How America’s 2024 election will affect Britain’s

There were many potential titles for Liz Truss’s memoir: 49 Days that Shook the World, perhaps, or simply What Happened, like Hillary Clinton’s. Instead, she’s gone for a cri de coeur: Ten Years to Save the West.

Such swashbuckling language is best suited to an American market, and the former prime minister seems to have this in mind. She has declared that her book will appear ‘ahead of the US presidential election’ and explain why it’s vital that ‘conservative arguments win – and the left is defeated’. In the PR so far, Truss has referenced Joe Biden more times than Sunak or Starmer.

It’s not just that the American book market is more lucrative. Truss wants her brand of Conservatism to influence the political debate in the US. But for the first time in decades, the British and American electoral cycles are on course to coincide, and un-happily for Truss, any effect British thinking has on America is bound to be eclipsed by America’s effect on us.