Have you heard the one about the missing Ocado delivery at Downing Street? It’s side-splitting stuff
British public life often tends toward sitcom, and you imagine that once the catastrophic economic fallout of her time in office has faded – in a generation or two’s time – Liz Truss’s 40-odd days in Downing Street might yet be viewed in those terms. Certainly, that seems the legacy she most craves.
The first extracts from her farcical book, Ten Years to Save the West, reveal it to be written with all those gifts for “Accidental Partridge” that she displayed in office (key quote: “For too long, the political debate has been dominated by how we distribute a limited economic pie. Instead, we need to grow the pie so that everyone gets a bigger slice.”). Her memoir’s most immediately memorable scenes are ready-made for canned laughter. There’s the one in which she spent her few days in power itching because of an outbreak of fleas in the prime ministerial apartment (a parting gift, she half-implies, of the Johnsons’ dog, Dilyn); the one in which her promise to the nation of “delivery, delivery, delivery” falls at the first hurdle of a missing Ocado order; the one in which she finds the fridge full of protein shakes labelled “Raab”, from her power-hungry colleague; and the one in which she struggles to get a mobile phone signal on a call with the US secretary of state and has to hang out of an upstairs window to hear about the invasion of Ukraine. There will never be a second season.
