The News Agents Muse On ‘Zombie’ Liz Truss’ Talk Of ‘Unfinished Business’ And Downing Street Memoir

The News Agents podcast hosts Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis mused on former Prime Minister Liz Truss’ “zombie” comeback tour on Monday, ahead of an LBC interview in which she refused to rule out a second shot at Conservative Party leadership and admitted she had “unfinished business” in politics.

The conversation comes as Truss published extracts from her new book in the Daily Mail, titled Ten Years to Save the West Lessons: From The Only Conservative in the Room, and ahead of an interview between Truss and LBC host Iain Dale, set for broadcast on Monday evening.

Truss, who was introduced as a modern day “Margaret Thatcher” by right-wing Republicans and supporters of former President Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February, has asserted that she was a victim of the “deep state” and that her libertarian plans were met with “huge establishment backlash.”

At home, however, Truss is known for having fallen out of favour rapidly with her Conservative peers and the British public after a calamitous “mini budget” in September 2023 that alarmed financial markets, caused borrowing rates to spike, and led to a significant devaluation of the British pound.

Speaking on Monday afternoon’s podcast, Sopel said: “Liz Truss tweeted this morning, ‘Read about my final days in Downing Street in the Daily Mail today.’ [The Labour Party’s] Jess Phillips MP tweeted back saying, ‘Also known as her initial days in Downing Street.’ It’s very hard to know what to think about a book that covers a 49-day premiership, which an awful lot of people have already forgotten about and only remember for all that went wrong. And this is Liz Truss’ attempt to say, ‘Hang on, there’s another version of events.’”

Maitlis replied: “Yeah, because she has made it very clear to our colleague Iain Dale on LBC, and you can hear that in full tonight, that she is not going anywhere. And by that we mean she’s not gone. She is ‘Zombie Truss’ ready for the rematch.’

Cutting to a clip from the interview, Truss can be heard explaining that both she and the Conservatives have “unfinished business” and that they “haven’t done enough to reverse the Blair legacy.” She goes on to explain that she helped establish the Popular Conservatives caucus in a bid to build support for the libertarian ideas she promoted during her brief tenure and that she believed the right “people [will] emerge who are ready to take leading roles.”

Reacting, Mailis asked: “What does she say? ‘Emerge to take leading roles.’ Is that, was that it? Is she emerging? Is she taking another leading role?”

Sopel replied: “Well, I mean, this is somebody who clearly feels that there is a comeback awaiting her and that, you know, come the next Tory leadership contest, presumably after a general election, when it may be, that there are not many Tory MPs left and one of the safest seats in the country is hers. And so, you know, she could… Don’t rule it out. And she is trying to say, ‘I was the libertarian who was giving the British people unpalatable truths and the system didn’t want to hear it. I was right. They were wrong.’”

Turning to the book, Maitlis said: “It’s interesting because the other excerpts from the book that we’ve sort of read over the weekend have suggested that she was really unhappy as Prime Minister. It’s a bit like listening to somebody screaming for three minutes on a roller coaster, you know, ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to be sick.’ And then getting off it and going, ‘Oh, that was great fun. I think I’m another go.’ And she sort of goes into some detail about how lonely it was in Downing Street, doesn’t she?”

“Cut off from the world,” Sopel added.

“Yeah. I mean, funny enough, I did have a certain amount of sympathy with her saying she felt quite imprisoned and little things, just little life moments… Bits of life laundry. You couldn’t make it work. You didn’t know where to get your shopping delivered. You didn’t know how to get medicine in the middle of the night. You couldn’t go for a run on your own without sort of taking your bodyguards with you. You couldn’t even get a haircut or, you know, a hair and makeup appointment when you had to go out and face the cameras. And so a bit of me on a very sort of, I don’t know, female, human level thought, yeah, God, that actually sounds ghastly.”

Sopel further: “But at the same time, I think it points to the sort of naivety. plausibility kind of this she was never born for this role.”

Watch above on The News Agents.