Liz Truss book - latest: Ex-PM claims she was ‘too busy’ to back Brexit – as she endorses Trump
Liz Truss launched into a scathing attack on Joe Biden saying it ‘has to be’ Donald Trump to win the presidential election.
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Liz Truss has claimed she was “too busy” to back Brexit as she backs Donald Trump to win November’s US presidential election.
It comes as Ms Truss, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, said the “world was safer” under Trump’s presidency as she criticised incumbent Joe Biden.
The former PM, who was in office for 49 days, suggested she may have backed Vote Leave if she had “time for more existential thinking”.
Ms Truss said wanting to leave the EU was “considered quite a far out, fringe position”.
But she added: “Had I spend more of my time thinking about it during those years, I might have come to share that view… but I had been busy as a minister, knee-deep in floods and other distractions”.
Ms Truss also launched into a scathing attack on President Joe Biden saying it “has to be” Donald Trump to win.
“I don’t think (President Joe) Biden has been particularly supportive to the United Kingdom. I think he’s often on the side of the EU. And I certainly think I would like to see a new president in the White House,” she told LBC.
Liz Truss wing of the Tory party fighting against smoking ban - Labour shadow minister claims
Wes Streeting has accused the Liz Truss wing of the Conservatives of trying to choke off the smoking ban that is due to be debated today.
He posted on X: “Rishi Sunak might be weak but Labour will not allow the Liz Truss wing of the Conservative Party to choke off the Smoking Bill today.
“We will give our full support to this Bill so that the next generation are even less likely to smoke than they are to vote Conservative.”
Liz Truss says she was ‘too busy’ to back Brexit
Liz Truss has said she was “too busy” to back Brexit during the 2016 referendum campaign.
The ex-PM, who campaigned for Remain in the run-up to the Brexit vote, said she may have backed Vote Leave if she had “time for more existential thinking”.
Ms Truss said wanting to leave the EU was “considered quite a far out, fringe position”.
But she added: “Had I spend more of my time thinking about it during those years, I might have come to share that view… but I had been busy as a minister, knee-deep in floods and other distractions”.
She also said she was reluctant to back the Leave campaign because she “did not think it could win” and out of loyalty to David Cameron and George Osborne who had “put me where I was”.
Liz Truss tried to cancel Cop26 climate conference
Liz Truss has admitted she tried to scrap the Cop26 climate conference, hosted in Glasgow in 2021.
The former PM was chief secretary to the Treasury at the time and, in her memoir, says she “strongly questioned” whether the “jamboree” should be a priority for the government - pointing to the £200m+ price tag.
Ms Truss’s predecessor and then boss Boris Johnson said Cop26 was a summit that “proved the doubters wrong”, hailing it as a success that drew 120 heads of state to Britain and saw the world “unite in calling time on coal”.
Ms Truss wrote in her book that she was in “a minority of one” in questioning the conference, which she described as “environmental virtue signalling”.
She added that, after trying to ditch Cop26, then environment secretary Michael Gove described her as “the Grinch who wants to stop Christmas”.
Tory minister ‘not planning to’ read Liz Truss book
A senior Tory has said she is “not planning to” read Liz Truss’s memoir, describing it as an attempt for the former PM to “vindicate her time in office”.
Laura Farris, the minister for victims and safeguarding, said “I perhaps don’t agree with everything that she has to say”.
Asked by Sky News about the Liberal Democrat claim that Ms Truss is a “national embarrassment”, Ms Farris said she would “not get into personal criticisms”.
She added: “I know that she has an account of her time in office, what she thinks happened… I have always been very supportive of the prime minister [Rishi Sunak].”
Liz Truss claims ‘unconscious racism’ was more important than reading and writing at school
Liz Truss has said lessons about “unconscious racism” were more of a priority at her school than “ensuring everyone could read and write properly”.
The ex-PM, who went to a state secondary school in Leeds in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said “political correctness pervaded everything it did”.
She said she did not want to describe it as a “sink” school, but that it was simply “not particularly bad and not particularly good either”.
Ms Truss wrote: “What wound me up was the political correctness that pervaded everything it did, and the sense that lessons on unconscious racism seemed more of a priority than ensuring that everyone could read and write properly.”
Nick Clegg ‘much better suited to California and Facebook’, Truss says
Liz Truss has added ex-Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg to the growing list of figures she has attacked for thwarting her Conservative ideas.
Attacking his June 2013 decision to block a package of childcare reforms she was attempting to champion, Ms Truss said Sir Nick would “rather be popular than do the right thing”. “He has now found a much more appropriate home in California and is working for Facebook,” she added.
Sir Nick is the president of global affairs at Facebook’s parent company Meta.
Truss reveals Tories saw Lib Dems as ‘spies’ in coalition
As well as moaning about uncooperative civil servants, Liz Truss used her book to complain about the headaches of coalition government.
“I also had to deal with the fact that back then we Conservatives were serving in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats,” she wrote.
She added: “Each government department had a Liberal Democrat minister working alongside the Conservatives (known to us as spies).”
Ms Truss accused the party of seeking to score “political points with the progressive left” and said it was the “way of life” for education ministers to bypass the Lib Dems and the “rather wet” Conservatives in No10.
‘I was branded a “martinet” by civil servants,’ Truss claims
Liz Truss has hit out at civil servants for delivering her reforms too slowly, and claimed she was branded a “martinet” for phoning them directly to ask why deadlines had been missed.
Writing about her first government job, as a junior minister in the Department for Education, Ms Truss said she felt like “a child emperor”.
“Your every whim about how you would like your coffee served or your papers stacked is pandered to,” she said.
But she added that when it came to her “challenging the way the system operates”, there were “endless ways requests could be evaded”.
The ex-PM said civil servants were “not impressed” when she began phoning them directly to ask why deadlines had not been met, while “friends across government” had “quiet words” with her about the approach.
“Articles appeared in the press describing me as a ‘martinet’ (a strict disciplinarian),” she added. “And all just for asking officials to do things and adhere to deadlines!” she exclaimed.
Liz Truss: ‘Very stupid to say I crashed the economy’
Liz Truss has said those who accuse her of “crashing the economy” with her disastrous tax-cutting budget are either “very stupid or very malevolent”.
The former PM, whose so-called mini budget helped wipe around £425bn from UK pension funds in 2022, said those who make the claim “are not telling the truth”.
In a Daily Telegraph interview to promote her book Ten Years to Save the West, Ms Truss said: “The people who claim I crashed the economy are not telling the truth.
“They’re either very stupid or very malevolent. Because it’s clearly not true so they should be ashamed of themselves.”
Labour has repeatedly accused Ms Truss of having “crashed the economy” with the September 2022 financial event.
Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner has accused Ms Truss of making a “twisted victory lap” to promote the memoir, repeating the claim that the Conservatives under Ms Truss “crashed the economy”.
Closing blog
We are closing this liveblog for now. You can see the latest news on Liz Truss here.
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