Sandra Stiskalo: Liz Truss has written a book where everyone is an idiot except herself

The face of my local bookseller froze.

- Theoretically, we could order it, she said tentatively when she recovered from the shock.

I had asked for Liz Truss's new book "Bank job. A short book on how the bank of England broke the bond market and brought down the government".

That an independent bookstore in the London borough of Hackney, where the Green Party won a landslide victory in the spring local elections, did not buy the title didn't really surprise me.

But the fact that the book was also not available at the big chain at the London Bridge train junction did. After all, the author is a former prime minister.

A brief review is perhaps in order.

On September 6, 2022, Liz Truss moved into 10 Downing Street with the ambition to get the British economy in order. Instead, she spooked the market, sent the pound plummeting and mortgage rates skyrocketing with her sudden and massive tax cuts and borrowing. That is the usual explanation for her resignation after only 45 days in the post.

Liz Truss emphatically dismisses it in her book, claiming that it was just the opposite.

Reviews in the British press have not been kind.

"Liz Truss's new book is the most insane thing I've ever read," writes The Telegraph's critic.

"Liz Truss is crazy (but she has a good point)," read the headline in The Times.

And in The Guardian, instead of a review, they have published an almost unreadable parody, with exaggerations, spelling errors, capital letters and lower case holes about noise. A textual caricature of her chaotic and self-righteous persona.

Truss herself would argue that these sawings in themselves are proof that her main thesis is correct. That is to say, Britain is in fact run by a corrupt and unaccountable bureaucratic cabal.

The commentators and reviewers who reject her ideas are part of this inbred establishment, where everyone went "to the same university, sits on the same panels and fears the same accusations."

"Bank job" is a strange book, written with emotion and full of financial terms and abbreviations. There is no self-criticism here as far as the eye can see.

According to Truss, it was not her drastic so-called mini-budget, in which she presented unfunded tax cuts of nearly SEK 600 billion, that sent interest rates soaring and pushed pension funds to the brink of collapse. The fault was that of the "left-leaning" English central bank, which the day before had decided to sell government bonds for the equivalent of more than one trillion kroner. Without notifying her!

The media neither wanted nor could see it.

"Most journalists don't understand economics, let alone monetary policy, and they swallowed the version they were fed."

The first statement in that sentence may be correct. Unfortunately, one does not feel more enlightened after reading her book.

She writes that "all tax cuts are unfunded" and is convinced that Britain would have been a better country today if her budget had not been sabotaged. The cost of living had been lower, lots of new housing had been built, more gas and oil had been pumped up from the North Sea and London had been leading the AI ​​revolution.

The economic commentators scoff at the analysis.

It's a laugh that's easy to fall into. And it gained new momentum when it turned out that she attended a wake banquet at Mar-a-Lago (without Donald Trump, who was in Washington) during the midterm elections.

Liz Truss is not the only self-righteous British Prime Minister to have blundered or been found to be on the wrong side of history, but no one is ridiculed like her. She has become the nation's operating cuckoo.

The question has been asked before and is just as painful to ask now: Do we think Liz Truss is the biggest donkey because we are sexists?

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