Imagine that there is an accusation constantly coming at you that you think is unfair, and that unfailingly works its way under your skin where it itches. Imagine further that you have significantly more confidence in yourself than the average passenger on the Clapham omnibus.
The obvious next step should not be to engage a “dynamic and creative law firm” to compile these slanders into an easily digestible six-page document that can be effectively distributed to anyone who cares to pay attention.
Still, that’s exactly what it is former Prime Minister Liz Truss have done. Her legal representative, Asserson, has issued a cease-and-desist letter to her successor, Sir Keir Starmer, in a bid to prevent him repeating the “false and defamatory” accusation that she “crashed the economy” during her tenure. 49 days as head of the UK government.
His repetition of these comments has, she claims, damaged her reputation and was one of the factors that led to her defeat in her South West Norfolk constituency at the 2024 general election.
The meat of Truss’s defense is the financial turmoil that followed her chancellorship Kwasi Kwartengs presentation of Growth plan to Parliament in September 2022 did not include a fall in GDP or a rise in unemployment, and therefore cannot fairly be described as a “crash of the economy”.
In addition, Dr. Andrew Lilico, Executive Director of Europe’s economyquoted in a report that any disruption was due to circumstances beyond Truss’ control and that the “LDI crisis” – the over-reliance on liability-driven investment – ”would have happened at some point anyway. event”.
It’s hard to know where to start. There is debate over the exact timeline and causation of the volatile economic conditions that surrounded the so-called “mini-budget”, the extent of its long-term effects, and the distinction between fact and perception. That debate will rage on for decades, in the pages of memoirs and magazines.
What is certain is that three weeks to the day after the announcement of the Growth Plan, Kwarteng, one of Truss’s closest and oldest allies in the House of Commons, was ousted as chancellor and replaced by Jeremy Hunt. The new Chancellor’s subsequent announcements and Autumn’s statement canceled every tax cut except the reduction in National Insurance contributions and the increase in the stamp duty threshold, lowered the energy price ceiling and imposed cuts in public spending.
It was a violent jerk of the steering wheel to avoid a crash that Truss says never happened. The BBC’s economics editor, Faisal Islam, called it “perhaps the biggest U-turn in British economic history”.
That misses the point anyway. Politics is not defined by what happens but by what we remember happened. It is widely understood by the electorate that Truss’s record-short premiership was a disaster, and that the disaster revolved around a huge financial miscalculation. Whether it is described as a “crash” or not is as important as the exact arrangement of the RMS Titanics sunbeds.
Then you can say that when the straws slip through his fingers, is Truss right to fight back against this story and regain his reputation in the eyes of the voters? If she can change how people remember her premiership, she will, in a way, change what happened.
That could in theory be true. But Truss at 10which Sir Anthony Seldon called his painstaking study of her brief premiership, is a period beyond reputational salvage. The subtitle of Seldon’s book is “How Not to be Prime Minister”. Truss is not yet 50 but she is out of parliament and there is no second act for her in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. She lacks the self-awareness and grace to follow David Cameron, Alec Douglas-Home, Austen Chamberlain or AJ Balfour into office under a successor.
A court order to Sir Keir Starmer would in any event have no effect in the House of Commons. Article IX i Bill of Rights 1688 says “that the freedom of speech and debate or proceedings in Parliament should not be prosecuted or questioned in any court or elsewhere outside Parliament”. So the Prime Minister could say what he liked from the mailbox.
All these arguments are secondary to the sheer, obvious weirdness of an advocated defender of free speech trying to use the law to bully an internationally renowned barrister and King’s Counsel. The idea that public opinion can be positively regulated and shaped through minatory legal instruments and bans on specific phrases is pure madness.
The issuance of this cease-and-desist letter only makes sense to one person: Liz Truss. For her, it’s another blow to the Deep State, the anti-growth coalition, the Establishment conspiracy that cruelly and underhandedly brought her down. For everyone’s sake, including her own, the former prime minister should cease and desist.
