If Liz Truss had not been turfed out as prime minister a mere 49 days into the job, the UK would have become an interplanetary economic behemoth… according to Liz Truss.
In her new book Bank Job, the country’s briefest PM sets out the reasons why the disaster that followed her infamous mini-budget really wasn’t her fault.
And in a gameshow-style twist, she even offers us a glimpse of what we could have won had we not given up on her so quickly.
The final chapter of the book is simply titled ‘2040’, and sets out a vision of how the country would look by the end of the next decade if Truss had been given the chance to see out her term at No 10.
Alongside the repeal of the Equality Act, Human Rights Act and the Climate Change Act, the born-again YouTuber slips in a loftier, Musk-esque alternate reality.
She writes: ‘Several missions to Mars have now been launched from Britain’s space port.’
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There are two spaceports currently in the UK, one of which – Saxavord in Shetland – is capable of Cape Canaveral-style vertical rocket launches.
Neither have hosted any launches so far, and it would require a fair bit of scaling up to go from sending small satellites into orbit to sending a crew of humans on the months-long voyage to the Red Planet.
It has now been four years since Truss’s short spell on Downing Street, during which inflation hit over 10%, the economy fell into crisis mode, and Queen Elizabeth II died.
She lost her seat to Labour at the 2024 general election, and has since embraced Maga-style right-wing populism while floating various theories for her unprecedented downfall that do not involve anything she did.
In March, she spoke to the controversial former boss of Donald Trump’s Border Patrol and suggested the UK should get the right to bear arms.
Bank Job: A Short Book on How the Bank of England Broke the Bond Market and Brought Down the Government – a title with almost twice as many letters as days she spent at No 10 – is Truss’s second book since her time as a major world leader drew to a close in 2022.
The first, Ten Years to Save the West, was a wild ride through her political career and the lessons she arguably learned along the way.
It was not exactly showered in praise by critics, and it appears her latest effort is meeting the same fate.
A reviewer in the Daily Telegraph called Bank Job ‘the most deranged things I’ve ever read’, while the Financial Times said the premise is ‘as sober, serious and measured as you’d expect from someone who wants to abolish the United Nations’.
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