Great Britain is a “failed state” underpinned by a “deeply rotten” system run by “commissars”. That’s not according to President Putin, or another of the UK’s adversaries, but Liz Truss, the former prime minister. The words were delivered as part of a speech given last month at the conservative US conference CPAC, signalling the start of Truss’s rebrand as a Make America Great Again wannabe.
Truss has pledged to launch a new “free speech media network” in the UK this summer “in conjunction with American allies”.
The station will “take on the Britain Bashing Corporation”, she told the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon. Truss assured the man who gave what seemed to be a Nazi salute during his own CPAC speech: “You will be uncensored and uncancellable on our network.”
Speaking at CPAC
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Allies suggested the network could be like Triggernometry, a “free speech YouTube show and podcast” with 1.25 million subscribers. Based in Kent, it is presented by the “anti-woke” libertarian Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, a comedian.
Interviews with former advisers, allies, friends and neighbours suggest Truss’s tilt to the right has left her almost friendless in Britain, with even her closest allies distancing themselves — but can her pivot to ape the politics of the Trump movement help her find a new role stateside?
Her decision to talk down the UK with the ruling party of the country’s most important ally is especially controversial if, as The Times understands, she continues to claim about £8,000 a month in taxpayer funding for her private office.
Cabinet Office accounts show she claimed in excess of £124,000 in her first 17 months after leaving Number 10 to run her office, a figure that may have since swelled to £225,000.
She has employed a press secretary, Jonathan Isaby, “full time” since December 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Cosying up to Trump’s former strategist
Truss, who began her political life as a Liberal Democrat arguing for the abolition of the monarchy, has turned her back on what she calls the “Conservatives-in-Name-Only” party.
After the general election, where she lost her seat in South West Norfolk, there were rumblings she might try and stand again as an MP, according to her successor, Labour’s Terry Jermy, who claimed she continued to email press releases “about once a week”.
Locally, people concluded she was “definitely interested in standing again”, although the local releases stopped in the autumn.
One adviser claimed she has calculated there is nothing left for her in the UK in terms of a political career, and that America and Maga is where her future lies.
In her speech at CPAC and in interviews on right-wing YouTube channels, she has attacked Sir Keir Starmer for “Orwellian policies”, called for the defunding of the BBC and labelled Islamism one of the greatest threats to Britain.
She wrongly told Republicans “the mainstream media have failed to report on the grooming gang scandal” and turned down an interview with The Times because the newspaper was “part of the deep state”, according to a source.
Instead, she spoke to Bannon, the former Trump strategist and boss of the right-wing Breitbart News.
Truss told him “we are going to have a Trump-style revolution in Britain”, to which he replied: “Amen.” A year earlier, she was interviewed on Bannon’s show and remained silent as he called Tommy Robinson a “hero”.
Truss on War Room, another of Bannon’s shows
Truss is also a regular on YouTube chat shows such as Andrew Gold’s Heretics. Her interview there — titled “The Dark Truth: This is Who REALLY Rules The UK” — sits alongside others on Gold’s page: “The end of civilization as we know it”, “My list of famous paedophiles would shock the world” as well as an interview with Robinson.
When she wrote her book — Ten Years to Save the West — she was represented by Javelin, the agency that sold books written by the Trump cheerleader Tucker Carlson.
In the UK the book sold 2,228 copies in its first week — a tenth of the number sold by David Cameron for his autobiography and 40 times fewer than Tony Blair for his. Truss’s book spent a week at number three for general hardbacks, allowing Truss to list herself as a “Sunday Times bestselling writer” on her X account. A year on, Ten Years to Save the West has sold 7,700 copies in total, according to NielsenIQ BookData.
The US edition was published by Regnery, the Republicans’ publisher of choice, whose authors include Sarah Palin, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz and one Donald J Trump.
‘Disappearing’ from Norfolk
Truss’s shift to the US is evidenced by the fact she has largely deserted her modest Norfolk three-bed home. Neighbours even wondered whether she was selling up while complaining that the peeling paint on the exterior was an eyesore.
“I haven’t seen her or her husband and kids for months,” Stuart Marsh, 63, a full-time carer who lives next door, said. “It’s as if she disappeared off the face of the earth.”
The couple have had tradesmen working on the home’s interior. “I have noticed builders’ vans since Christmas,” a third neighbour said. “She might be selling up.”
She and her husband, the accountant Hugh O’Leary, are more commonly seen at their £1.6 million house in Greenwich, southeast London, although their elder daughter, Frances, 18, moved to St Andrew’s University to study mathematics in September.
The couple in Downing Street at the start of Truss’s six-week stint as prime minister
TIMES PHOTGRAPHER JACK HILL
Neighbours have also complained about the cost of Truss’s “completely ridiculous” security. “She always has two or three Range Rovers and five or six security guards with her. “It’s almost theatrical,” one commented. “I know that has to be costing the taxpayer a lot. And for someone who was in power for just 44 days? She is clearly not a politician for the people. She’s a politician for herself.”
A second neighbour said: “I don’t buy into this affiliation with Donald Trump. I feel she’s just trying to screw everyone over … get back at the Tories.”
Clinging on to the limelight
Another explanation for her shift to America could be financial. In the 18 months after she left Downing Street, she received £348,533 in outside earnings, and a further £107,504 in donations and benefits in kind.
She was paid up to £67,000 for a single speech and spoke at several engagements in the US, including at the Heritage Foundation, which has called to “root out the Deep State”, and the Young America’s Foundation, which recently hosted the radical conservative Ben Shapiro. The sums do not include earnings made since May 2024.
Former advisers presented an alternative theory for heading stateside: “I do think a lot of her actions can be explained by the fact that she enjoys the limelight and she wants to stay in it.”
Her social media accounts angle to show her proximity to Trump’s administration. Days after losing her parliamentary seat, she posted a photo outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
On the day of the president’s inauguration, she posted a photo outside the £400-a-night Mayflower Hotel, five minutes from the White House, in Washington. While other conservative former leaders were invited to the ceremony itself — including Mateusz Morawiecki, the former Polish prime minister — Truss did not make the cut.
‘Nice if she’d shown humility’
Her efforts to “break America” are also about defending her reputation, which was largely shredded by a tax-cutting mini-budget that put the pound on parity with the dollar, caused borrowing rates to spike and led the Bank of England to step in with an emergency £65 billion scheme to sure up pension funds.
Measure-by-measure the tax cuts were reversed and 49 days after taking office, Truss resigned. Now she regularly attacks the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Reponsibility, and claims that the current chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has avoided being shamed for sky-high interest rates on gilts, another side effect or her administration’s budget.
A former adviser claimed she has failed to show “responsibility and humility for the mistakes she made”. They added: “She’s done anything she can to try and carve out a media career … A lot of her UK friends are not really with her any more.”
Even Baroness Coffey, previously Truss’s most loyal political ally and her former deputy prime minister, has distanced herself. “I am still friends with Liz but we don’t talk about our political paths,” she told The Times.
A banner depicting a lettuce is unrolled behind Truss at an event in Suffolk last year. Truss stormed offstage moments after the prank, which recalled the Daily Star’s prediction that the plant would outlive her tenure in No 10
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Jacob Rees-Mogg, Truss’s former business secretary, was kinder. “A lot of her ideas are the things that Donald Trump is putting into effect in the US. I think she is able to bring people together, she’s interested in ideas and still has a significant contribution to make,” he said.
“She likes a good reinvention, this is just the latest one,” said a former adviser who remains loyal. “I think they do like her in the States. They see her as an example of this whole deep state versus political appointments issue.”
Back on UK screens?
Truss’s representative declined to answer a series of questions about her new media network, including who will be funding it.
Mark Littlewood, the director of PopCon and a close friend of Truss, said: “We are witnessing a switch away from mainstream, legacy media as the cornerstone of the public square towards the Joe Rogan show or platforms like Triggernometry.
“I think she’s on to something in her analysis — that does seem to be the way the media landscape is going, with a clearer editorial stance rather than the supposedly objective BBC. I guess that’s her plan, and if so more power to her elbow.”
Truss’s network could see her back in the limelight on this side of the Atlantic this year — if it takes off. “Building these kinds of institutions requires attention to detail, patience and hard work,” a former No 10 adviser said. “So I don’t think anything will come of it.”
Truss was approached for comment.
Additional reporting: Oliver Wright