‘Riddled With Contradictions’: Times Radio Host Unleashes Brutal Review Of Liz Truss’ Downing Street Memoir

Times Radio host Matt Chorley unleashed a merciless review of former Prime Minister Liz Truss’ new book, blasting the work as a conflicted call for a “deeper state” by a libertarian who wants to blame “everyone else” for her eventual downfall.

The book, Ten Years to Save the West Lessons: From The Only Conservative in the Room, which was released on Tuesday, was teased in a recent U.S. tour and in the Daily Mail over the past week in the form of excerpts that spiked curiosity but Chorley shared some of the wider issues he found in his read through.

Speaking to his co-hosts on Tuesday, Chorley said: “The whole thing is riddled with contradictions. She wants more spending, but then she says too many people are addicted to spending. She says the Queen told her, ‘Pace yourself.’ She says, ‘Maybe I should have done,’ and then literally on the next page is saying, ‘Why would I have slowed down? Why would I have gone for that?’ It is absolutely potty. It is an astonishing work of literature. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it.”

Detailing the apparent contradiction of Truss’ ideological aim of paring back the state and wanting more provision for government leaders, he added: “She talks about the lack of support for prime ministers in Downing Street.”

Co-host Aasmah Mir interjected: “Is this about [grocery delivery app] Ocado?”

Chorley continued: “Yeah, well, she couldn’t get her Ocado delivery in. When she was ill, a diary said she had to go to the doctors. The fact that when Boris Johnson was ill, there wasn’t a sort of medical support. She was booking her own hair appointments and all that. However, this is from someone who thinks we need a smaller state. She complains that MPs are addicted to public spending.”

Rationalising Truss’ complaints, Chorley agreed that “there is a good case for saying that the way that we treat our Prime Minister, put them in a pokey flat, which is infested with fleas and all that, isn’t very good.”

He added: “She rightly draws a comparison to US presidents who have doctors on standby and caterers and chefs and all of that. However, she’s not advocating any of that. I mean, actually, the weird thing that she’s actually advocating is a, almost you might say, a deeper state.”

Mir asked: “What about the kind of personalities in there? I don’t know, [then-Chancellor] Kwasi Kwarteng, [then-Home Secretary] Suella Braverman, [then-Health Minister] Robert Jenrick, etcetera.”

Chorley replies: “Oh, it’s all their fault. Everything, everything. Absolutely everything is somebody else’s fault. It’s either an acronym. She doesn’t like acronyms. So it’s the BBC, the [International Monetary Fund] IMF, I don’t know, [furniture retailer] MFI probably. The [Bank of England] BOE, the [European Court of Human Rights] ECHR. I mean, any number of those people.”

“The OBR,” the co-host offered.

“[Pop band] S Club 7 probably,” Chorley added. “The lack of self-reflection is… in any person, is extraordinary.”

Mir asked: “Is anything her fault?”

“No,” Chorley responded.

Mir prompted: “There must be, no, come on, there must be something. Are there any admissions, concessions?”

Chorley continued: “She concedes that they had a lack of experts who supported their plan, who could go out and broadcast. Right. When they were doing, as we found, we were constantly, she was the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, new Prime Minister, every day we were… It was very easy to get people to come on and say what she was doing was the wrong thing to do. It was really hard, it wasn’t the lack of trying, to get people to come on Times Radio and say it was the right thing to do. And what she can’t quite make the leap to is maybe the lack of experts was because people who knew what they were talking about thought it wasn’t the right thing to do. I think the thing she’s found as she’s gone around doing all of the interviews, weirdly not on Times Radio, for some reason she doesn’t want to speak to me, does she? Is how unseriously anyone is taking it. You know, when you’ve got [BBC journalist] Chris Mason on the 10 O’Clock News saying a normal person, humiliated the way she was, might have gone and run a B&B in Crete. And he asked her, you know, ‘Isn’t it humiliating?’ She said, ‘I wouldn’t say humiliating.’ It is humiliating she became Prime Minister.”

Mir added: “She’s doubling down, Matt.”

Chorley said: “Everyone told her, if you do this and do unfunded tax cuts, you’ll crash the economy and it won’t work. And it’s not that people blew her up. She did what she said she was going to do, and everything that everyone said was going to happen, happened.”

Watch above on Times Radio.