What Liz Truss got right

It’s easy to laugh at Liz Truss bringing out a book, much harder to ask whether there are points she makes that Westminster can actually learn from. The former prime minister obviously has a self-awareness problem which leads her to blame her failures on anyone and everyone who happened to be around at the time. That makes it much easier to dismiss the whole thing. But there are arguments – particularly within the final chapter – that we haven’t just heard from Truss, or indeed just from Conservatives. Even previous Labour leaders have complained about the resistance from the civil service to reforms. 

Speaking of previous prime ministers, one of the problems with Truss’s book is that she doesn’t consider how other leaders or indeed ministers have managed to triumph with their radical reforms. Her analysis is largely limited to what stopped her, rather than a full-scale assessment of how to exert power in Westminster.