Will anyone buy my Liz Truss book?

‘If you’re having a bad day at work,’ read the Twitter meme, ‘at least you’re not Harry Cole or James Heale.’ The inglorious collapse of Liz Truss’s government put paid to many plans, but none more so than the biography of the lady herself, which Harry and I have been writing for the past ten weeks. Having started the project as her biographers, we ended it as her political obituarists, furiously rewriting copy as it became clear that our intended cliff-hanger could only have one ending.

Our deadline was 29 October. Harry (who is the political editor of the Sun) and I signed the deal for Out of the Blue: The Astonishing Rise of Liz Truss on 20 August, so we had less than two months to throw ourselves into the madcap world of Truss. Of course, we had no idea just how mad things were going to get.

We began by making trips to dusty archives in Oxford and the British Library, as well as local landmarks in Greenwich, where Truss has lived for 20 years. In various pubs around Westminster, we drank with many of her old friends, colleagues, rivals and her (dwindling) band of admirers, who shared their memories.

The impression we formed from these interviews is that Truss’s steady rise through Westminster had sometimes obscured her steely self-belief and her iconoclastic instincts. And while such traits have their merits, they could produce spectacular blow-ups. Truss’s failed child-care ratio reforms during her first ministerial job at education in 2012 (which is when Dominic Cummings gave her the nickname the ‘human hand grenade’) can now be seen as a foreshadow of her disastrous mini-Budget ten years later.

In early October, as Harry and I were approaching our deadline, the government started to fall apart. We had a ringside seat as the bullish optimism of team Truss we had witnessed over the summer turned to despair.