LONDON — Liz Truss isn’t laughing at the lettuce that outlasted her premiership.
Asked Monday about the Daily Star’s live stream of a lettuce that eventually outlasted Truss’ chaotic, market-crashing period in Downing Street, the former British prime minister did not see the funny side.
“I don’t think it was particularly funny, I think it’s puerile,” Truss told Irish broadcaster RTÉ — after she snapped at the interviewer for even asking the question.
Truss — who crashed out of office after 44 days while the lettuce was still going strong — was speaking at the European Broadcasting Union’s NewsXchange conference in Dublin on Monday.
Since leaving No. 10, Truss has primarily intervened on foreign affairs and particularly on U.K.-Chinese relations. She became the first former U.K. PM to visit Taiwan in May and has called for “more action” from the West to combat China.
But in her interview with RTÉ’s David McCullagh, Truss was largely questioned about her brief spell in No. 10, where she quickly lost public and party support after announcing large-scale borrowing and unfunded tax cuts — all of which she then reversed in a matter of weeks.
Truss argued that the U.K. was, and still is, in “serious economic trouble” and that she needed to be “bold” to reverse declining economic growth. She admitted she lacked support from Tory MPs and “could have gone a bit slower” with her economic reforms.
The ex-PM also turned her fire on the U.K.’s media, who she attacked for treating politics as a “soap opera.”
“I do think sometimes politics is sort of treated as a branch of the entertainment industry, who’s up, who’s down, who says what about who,” Truss said.
“I think the level of understanding of economic ideas in the media and the ability to explain them is very poor indeed,” she added. A wide spectrum of economists criticized Truss’ economic reforms both before and after she enacted them for a brief period in No. 10.
Andrew McDonald
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