Upon the demise of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022, Liz Truss, the new Prime Minister, found herself among a gathering of world leaders. In her memoir, she claims to have wondered in this moment why she was the only conservative in the room.

In Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room, Truss tells tall tales of her history of antiestablishmentism from within the establishment, and the roadblocks set in place by a cabal of progressives with a vested interest in the demolition of socially conservative values, defined by the former Prime Minister as liberty, family, and national identity.

Truss wants this book to be a sort of alt-right manifesto, but typically falls short of the mark. It reads more like a memoir of her time in government since 2010; a Member of Parliament failing upwards in a party with an apparent death wish. She promises that this book is not a traditional political memoir, not simply a chance to justify every decision she made while in Westminster – but chapter after chapter, she does exactly that. She tells us the story of her career from beginning to end. Between the major crises of this Conservative era, Truss found herself time and again in political roles which she did not fully understand, attempting to implement ideas the self-evident ramifications of which she would not accept. This is an incompetent book about incompetence; a book about a lack of self-awareness which inherently lacks self-awareness.

Across a meandering and ultimately pointless narrative, Truss describes times when her cunning socially conservative plans to fix Britain’s flaws were thwarted by progressives in ‘the establishment’. These anecdotes are occasionally underscored by the things she feels she did achieve in her ministerial tenures, including the badger cull, “the gassing of 5000 ducks,” and guaranteed trade access in Japan for British blue cheese exporters.

Her stint as a junior minister in the Department for Education in Cameron’s government saw her develop a distaste for British state education, apparently flavoured by her own troubled school career. In an elucidating account of her teen years, Truss confesses she “lived in fear of being beaten up in the lunch queue or stabbed with a pair of scissors in my media studies class”. As in most of the following chapters, Truss’ account of her time in this department is punctuated by a ‘torpedoing’ of her sometimes disruptive, often peculiar ideas. She attributes this to what she sees as the fundamental flaw in Whitehall: its overreliance on non-governmental organisations and their ‘progressive’ ideologies.  

For eleven months – which presumably felt like a lifetime to Truss – she was Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary in Theresa May’s cabinet. “My eleven months as Justice Secretary were an eyeopener. Although I no doubt went about it in a clumsy fashion, I tried.” In an inconsistently accusatory, sporadically apologetic tone, Truss weaves another long, weary tale of the long-suffering minister entering a department – the Ministry of Justice, founded by the Blair government – to find that no work had been done by her predecessors, and exiting it with her ideas squandered, somehow, by Progressives in The Establishment.

In the final days of those eleven long months, the Daily Mail ran a story on the UK High Court’s finding that the government was required to win a vote in Parliament before Brexit negotiations could begin. Truss remained silent on the matter: not surprisingly, she found the outrage “completely mystifying.” She goes on to describe her ousting as a “classic establishment stitch-up,” manufactured in order to install Brian Leveson at the top judicial post, since he was apparently favoured by senior judges.

When a crisis heads in Truss’ direction, she deflects responsibility onto usually one of two targets: the 1997-2010 Labour governments, or the progressives in elusive positions of power in British officialdom. Before commencing this blame game, she qualifies her stories with speculations of “in retrospect, maybe I should…”, followed by an inevitable “but,” and finally stands by her initial crisis response.

Truss mostly comes across as confused, all her opinions paradoxical due to the relative simplicity in their logic. She is someone who buckles under pressure and points fingers at invisible pushers when she gets back up. “It is fair to say,” she believes, “the judicial establishment had not welcomed my appointment as Lord Chancellor in July 2016.” Not a year later, Truss found herself up against the will of the putative establishment, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. “I hadn’t realised quite how the legal establishment works,” she admits.

Writing primarily in platitudes, Truss offers few, if any, legitimate solutions to her supposed problems. “I still find it hard to comprehend,” she says of Boris Johnson’s COVID hospitalisation, “how the official state allowed this to happen.” She suggests there ought to have been “on-site medical supervision at No. 10 and proper infrastructure ready to provide support” to the Prime Minister and the government during the pandemic. I fail to see what on-site medical supervisors might have been able to achieve for a man who gleefully claimed to be ‘shaking hands with everybody’ during a hospital visit in March 2020.

Johnson’s misdeeds aside, the Tories love to remind us that there is no Magic Money Tree – so with her proposed lower taxes, how might Truss intend to fund Downing Street’s bespoke medical supervision? The answers are nowhere to be found. Ten Years to Save the West is an uncoordinated spattering of incomprehensible dogmas, truisms, and pontifications, wrapped up in unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about a cabal of legal and financial suits who can install and depose Prime Ministers.

For someone who appears to abhor the labels which come with left-wing identity politics, Truss likes to talk herself up as a kind of anarchistic agitator, proudly claiming to be a “contrarian”, someone who advocates for shaking things up and abolishing the status quo. I would argue a politician and their career can be defined best not by their self-descriptors but by their actions. In outlining her response to crises, such as her attempt to repeal Labour’s 2010 Equality Act in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, she strikes me as a bewildered reactionary. A crisis occurs, Truss instinctively jerks her knee, and The Establishment is made to administer the Botox and send her on her way, ad nauseam, for twelve years.

Her solution to the problem of wokeism? “We should learn from the US.” Truss frequently invokes the US framework for political and legal organisations, including the Supreme Court. Touching on foreign policy, she describes the United Kingdom and the United States alliance, harbingers of doom to people in the Global South, as “beacons of hope.” She heaps praise on the democratic processes on which the US operates and skims over the January 6^th insurrection attempt as merely a “seismic event,” revealing a carelessness for democracy if it no longer aligns with her career interests.

America is “Britain’s proudest creation,” Truss proclaims, perhaps unwise words from a prospective right-wing grifter across the Atlantic. She employs the classic fascist maxim that there is a “concerted challenge and threat to our core Anglo-American values.” This threat comes as much from within as from without, she explains; the rot of progressivism has infiltrated the establishment.

According to much of America’s alt-right – whose doctrines are convoluted and generally untrue and are therefore impossible to truly codify – the government’s woke cabal was installed by the Democratic Party in the 1990s, but it had existed forever in the form of Jewish bankers. Liz Truss posits that the Democrats’ British counterpart, the Labour Party, ingrained the so-called ‘progressive establishment’ in the same decade. Meanwhile, Amazon is recalling early prints of Ten Years to Save the West for its propagation of an antisemitic conspiracy theory about a global network of Jewish bankers.

As the Whitehall well runs dry for the 44-day Prime Minister, she sets her sights on the unwieldy conspiracy corps of US politics. Unfortunately, at American conferences like CPAC, Liz Truss won’t be the only conservative in the room.