‘Burnham will destroy Britain!’ Liz Truss unleashes on the PM

She's lampooned by the left and was blamed by Andy Burnham in his big speech of crashing the economy. But Liz Truss hits back and says that Britain is doomed if it believes this socialist conman, who she says is only a five out of ten. I want to see this country rescued. I think we're in serious trouble. I want to see the right win at the next election. But the starting point has to be what the right actually do. We are joined by former Prime Minister Liz Truss on The Daily Tee. Back on The Daily Tee. Good to see you. Good to be here. Shall we discuss Andy Burnham's barnstorming speech, which I'm sure you enjoyed from start to finish, including the very early on jibe where he said, well, I've been in the role for 10 weeks, which is better than some people. What can I say about that? I mean, the longer he's in, the worse it's getting. Every single indicator is worse than when I was in office. And the speech was a kind of schmaltz fest, as far as I'm concerned, and not dealing with the country's very, very serious problems. We're about to go into a winter with probable blackouts. The power grid's in a terrible state. We've got the worst debt now that we've had ever in our history. The guilt rates are back up again after Healy and Burnham's speech. And he's talking about, I think the country's in very, very, very serious trouble. What about what he said about reforming the triple lock in order to finance social care? That's one example of reducing spending, right? Yeah, I think the triple lock does have to go. I think most people recognise it has to go. Otherwise, it will take up the entire British state in due course. But it's a fairly small measure. He's only talking about 2030. We've got the problem now with the fact that the country hasn't run a surplus for 30 years. So I think it's fairly small beer in comparison to the size of the problem. And everything else he's talking about is going to cost more money. You know, nationalising industries, the state getting more involved in everything. There's no real solution to Britain's very serious economic problems. You tried to do something radical and it backfired. So when he speaks about successive government failure, to what extent do you accept that argument? I don't think you're going to accept his argument that it's all Thatcher and Brexit's fault. But some of the economic indicators that you've pointed out, low growth, high debt, high spend, high tax, that was a Tory problem and remains a Labour problem, right? See, what happened back in 2022 is the Bank of England caused the crisis. You know, they announced quantitative tightening, which means the selling of government bonds the day before the mini-budget. What did they do last week? When John Healey's gilt rates had got higher than they had in 2022, they announced the stop of quantitative tightening. So the Bank of England effectively bailed the Labour Party out when they had a problem with the gilt market. Whereas in my case, they put fuel on the fire. And this is answering your question, Camilla, because we have a basic problem with the British state. What did Blair do? He took huge powers away from elected politicians. He gave them to organisations like the Bank of England. He made the judiciary unaccountable. He created a massive quangrocracy. And the state is now on autopilot and failing. Why did Conservatives not succeed in dealing with immigration, in dealing with the economy? The answer is, Conservatives weren't willing to repeal. All of those Blairite laws, the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act, the Constitutional Reform Act. And that was our fundamental failing. But the problems of today were created by Blair and Brown. That's what we're still living with. And that, you know, if you look at what's happened to the British economy since they were in power and created this morass, it's been a disaster. This is why the Brexit thing is such a red herring. Because the problems did not start in 2020, when we actually left the EU. They started really seriously after the financial crisis. We don't want to talk too much about the past, because we're not Andy Burnham. He's obsessed with 1984. But I think we do need to talk about the past, Tim. Because the country does not yet agree on where it went wrong. And until you agree what the problem is, you can't really agree what the solution is. Are you saying the Bank of England deliberately made borrowing more expensive in order to crash your economic programme? I'm saying, at best, yes. At best, they were negligent, and at worst, they were deliberately doing it. But they knew we were going to announce our budget on the 23rd of September. Bear in mind, this is the Bank of England that had been printing money for 10 years. They announced the stopping of printing money and the start of quantitative tightening, the selling of government gilts, the day before we announced our budget. We didn't know they were going to do that. That had a massive effect on the market. And if you don't think it has an effect on the market, look at the effect it had last week. When the Bank of England announced the stop of quantitative tightening, the bond rates went down. And John Healey was let off the hook. You've got an exact counter-example here of a Labour government that are being helped by the Bank of England and a Conservative government that was being hindered. Well, if it wasn't negligence, then it was conspiracy. And if it was conspiracy, why would they do that? Why would they act to undermine it? Why would they do that? Why would they undermine the British government? Because we have institutions in Britain who are progressive-minded institutions. The Governor of the Bank of England has criticised Brexit. He's advocated for net zero. He's advocated for DEI. The Office of Budget Responsibility last week, or I think it was earlier this week, have apparently said that because migration is too low at the moment. Mm-hmm. the government headroom is going to be cut by seven billion pounds. We have ideologically biased people in our institutions. And it's not just the financial institutions. It's also the police. You know, look what the former Chief Constable of the West Midlands did. It's in our judiciary. This is a really serious problem. So what was it you were proposing to do that this cabal of progressives were willing to destroy the British economy? What they are believers in is Keynesianism. They believe in government spending generates economic growth. They do not believe that money supply expansion causes inflation. The Bank of England removed money from its equation about inflation in the 1990s. They have a particular worldview. I challenge that worldview. And what I know, and I was. You did that with a massive bailout for fuel. I mean, for things like you helped households with energy. I mean, that's classic Keynesianism, right? You bailed out the domestic fuel users. Well, the fuel policy was a separate policy. And by the way, it wasn't reversed after I was pushed out of office. So. I just don't understand what you were doing that was so controversial to this group of people. I mean, things like reducing the highest rate of tax, I mean, trying to get a bit of fracking. It doesn't sound like it's worth crashing the British economy in order to stop it. I'm not sure your budget was that radical. But I was also challenging their authority. Right. So in the run up, during the leadership election, I said, "We now have these economic institutions, the OBR, the Bank of England, the two powerful. I want to review their mandate." I opened it. Maybe it was a mistake to open the challenger authority. But it's certainly the case that they did not like being challenged and one of the very dysfunctional things about the way the British government works is that the Bank of England didn't tell us what they were doing. Anybody you can speak to about economic policy will tell you that monetary and fiscal policy should be coordinated. We had no idea that they were going to announce 80 billion pounds of gilt sales the day before we announced our fiscal policy. Otherwise, we would have done it differently. And that is a problem in a system. And look what the effect of quantitative easing has been. It's been disastrous. Young people can't get on the housing ladder. It's been hugely inflationary. We've had a huge asset bubble. It's essentially supported the growth of the state. And Camilla was asking earlier, why is it that the Conservative Party presided over a massive growth in the state, huge hikes in taxes? Well, we had economic institutions that were actively printing money to support that. Yes. And it's very, very difficult for a government minister to say, "I don't want free money." I mean, that is the truth. Ministers are always under pressure. They're under pressure to do more. I think that a couple of things might be true at the same time. I think there are many listening and watching this podcast who agree with this kind of progressive infiltration of all of our key institutions since Blair took power in 1997. But they may also think that you are absolving yourself of personal responsibility, bearing in mind your chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, has said, "Listen, we had the right ideas but the wrong execution." I think there are a lot of people who actually think that in blaming others rather than yourself that you have gone a bit mad. I mean, that could be a fair assessment. Well, what I would say is that I think there are people who actually think that in blaming others rather than yourself, that you have gone a bit mad. What I would say is that there are people who actually think that in blaming others Not clinical, but. No, no, exactly. No, but what I'd say is there's huge pressure to conform in British society and British politics. And, you know, I've been under huge pressure to say I was wrong. I still don't believe I was wrong. Not even in the execution? Because it was rushed. It was very, very rushed that period, wasn't it? And this is a lesson, by the way, for any future prime minister. If you do not act quickly, the blob will completely swallow you up. Completely swallow you up. But you acted within a month. I mean, it was very fast. Yes, but that is what you have to do. I mean, this is what Trump did in his administration. The problem was that the monetary policy, which does move the gilt markets, we've seen how it moved the gilt markets last week to support the Labour government, was not coordinated with the fiscal policy. That was the problem. If you look at, even the Bank of England themselves produced a report in 2024 saying that their failure to regulate the pension market had caused two-thirds of the crisis. That's not even including their announcement about quantitative tightening. So, you know, I don't see. So do you just feel you're being painted like the bogey woman of this piece? I think it's interesting that. But there's a reason that is happening. There is a reason because these institutions are extremely powerful. The government of the Bank of England is more powerful than the prime minister. They can't be sacked. According to the 1998 Bank of England Act, they are fundamentally more powerful. And I tried to take them on. Now, you might say that's a mistake. But my point is we will not have proper governance of our economy in Britain until we deal with this problem because we have these unelected people who are progressives. That is, you can read Bailey's public statements. You can look at Mark Carney's policies. He's now. Pursuing in Canada as prime minister. These people are progressives. They have huge power in our system. They're not elected. I think there's a massive problem. So where does the right. And of course people are going to attack the woman rather than the bull. Yes. Because they don't want to have a serious discussion about why our country has gone so badly wrong. I think just to step in and say, I think it's also, I was really interested and you made that point about Britain in many ways is a very conformist society that expects, for instance, when prime ministers step down, to. Do what Rishi has done and have a nice quiet column where you say interesting but fairly uncontroversial things or Theresa May stick around the commons and all that sort of thing. Whereas you have chosen to come out and continue making the arguments you were making in office. Is that the route you think of some of the. Is that one reason why you've become a magnet for so much abuse and criticism is because you've just not behaved the way most former prime ministers behave. You've not. I refuse to conform. I absolutely refuse to conform. And I think this country is in very, very serious trouble. We haven't even talked about migration and the huge problems we have with Islamification in some parts of our country. The grooming gangs, the issues that keep being brushed under the carpet. I mean, there's a pretense that everything's fine and we can just talk about whether welfare benefits claimants should be able to spend their money on alcohol or not. But we're not dealing with the very serious consequences of what the Blairite state has created. And we were talking about Burnham's speech. The most worrying thing I thought in it was proportional representation. Why is that so worrying? And it is so worrying because I think we only get our country back on track if we reverse Blair and Brown. That's what we have to do. That's what's created the problem. The institutions, they've created the Supreme Court, the unaccountable Bank of England, the unsackable civil service, which they did with the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. I think unless we get back control of our institutions from the progressives, this country will carry on heading in the same direction. I think if you have PR, you are not going to get a majority government able to overturn that. So I think you've baked in progressivism forever. And we've become Argentina. That's how serious I think it is. You make the state very large and powerful and then you make it impossible to reform because you cut the link between popular protest and governmental power. So no matter how many people work out that it's not working, you can't reform it. And also you almost always guarantee that Labour has some role in some kind of coalition because the numbers will then favour them. But let's talk about. I mean, look at Germany. Look at Germany. Let's talk about some solutions to all this because Tim and I were discussing this speech yesterday. You must accept you've been up on that stage. You've been on the world stage. You know how speeches can land well and land badly. Regardless of whether you were sold on his socialist snake oil, you must admit that it was presentationally quite effective. It was an improvement on Keir Starmer. I mean, the delegates loved it. Lefties will love it, Liz Truss. That's a problem for the right. Of course, communists love communism. Of course they're going to love it. That is what the Labour Party is moving rapidly to the left. We had Emily Thornberry calling for the confiscation of people's houses earlier this week. This is manna from heaven for these people, the type of vision that Andy Burnham has laid out. But it's a disastrous vision for our country. Of course, he's a better speaker than Keir Starmer. Of course, his voice is a lot less irritating than Keir Starmer's voice was. He looks better than Keir Starmer. There's no doubt about that. But it doesn't alter the fact. How would you rate him out of 10, looks-wise? That's a difficult question, Tim. How would you? Well, you're a solid nine. So what is. I'm pleased by that. So what is the Prime Minister? There you are. I've opened the bidding. Well, he's definitely over five, isn't he? There we are. What would you put Starmer on? Three. Right. I should have said 10, by the way, shouldn't I? That was really rude. Well, well. An attempt to be nice is going to sound really unshiverous. I apologise. 11. You're an 11, Liz. Well, it's too late now, Tim. You've nailed your colours to the market. That ship has sailed. But, Liz Truss, you've just laid out why all of those institutions turned against you as a righty trying to be radical. That's not going to fill righties with much hope because what you seem to be saying is anybody that does try to turn back time and reverse all of the Blair and Brownite reforms, to our constitution, the laws they brought in, the immigration changes, and all the rest of it, is going to basically be either compared to a lettuce, in your case, or literally chewed up and spat out in less than 50 days. So, how does Badenock take on board your experience, what she's now confronted with, which is a kind of man with fruttering eyelashes that even you say is higher than a five out of 10. What do the Conservatives now do? How do they take this on? I don't know. The lesson, I think, from what happened, and by the way, I was the only Conservative Prime Minister who actually cut taxes. I did get rid of the health and social care levy that Rishi Sunak tried to introduce. And I think it's significant that no other Conservative Prime Minister was even successful in doing that. They were caught in a straitjacket, and a straitjacket from the OBR, from the Bank of England, from the institutions. See, what needs to happen, on day one, is getting rid of that Blairite legislation. But why wouldn't the markets react equally as negatively to somebody else doing that as they did to you doing it? Well, I think there needs to be a bigger base of support in the country for doing that. So, I think the public have to be convinced about what the problem is. So, there's a bigger movement behind change. Do you think they weren't when you were in power, basically? Yeah, they weren't, definitely. They weren't ready for what you were saying. So, there certainly was not an understanding, and there still isn't in the country, of why we're in the mess we're in. And there's so much fake news of, it's all Brexit's fault that the country's in trouble, or it's all Liz Truss's fault, or it's all the fault of Mrs Thatcher that the country's in trouble. There's so much fake news generated that I don't think people understand the importance of what Blair did. So, yes, I think that's part of the problem. Another part of it is you've got to get that wider support. I think you have to have an electoral mandate to do it, to do that level of change. And I would point to Trump. So, Trump, in his first term, did not understand the way the American state worked, and it sought to undermine him at every opportunity. In Trump 2, he came in with a slew of executive orders on day one. He came in with his own people, like Musk with Doge, Scott Besson, he was ready to go on day one. And even then, he was put under massive pressure by the markets. If you remember, the tariff announcement got a lot of sort of market turbulence, and he has got a very good treasury secretary in Scott Besson, who knows the markets. You know, he was working with George Soros when they shorted the pound in 1992. So, you need that kind of person in those key jobs, who is connected with the markets, understands the markets, has a way of communicating that that's a big task but that's the only way i can see a future prime minister really being able to to change this country is you've got to you've got to act quickly you've got to act early you've got to have a body of support you've got to have understanding for the plan in the media but you also have the have the people but you have to have the people ready to serve in the bank of england in the treasury so is that person kemi badenock is it nigel farage is it somebody else entirely when trump ran in 2024 he was basically unopposed i mean okay nicki haley and people like that had to go but they didn't stand a chance whereas now in this country the center right is divided yes between two fairly equally popular by the way i don't know why we call it the center right it's sort of we never call them the center left we call them the left and the center right i think we should just be the right okay i'd be proud to be the right i think it's part of the kind of you know slightly shame-faced way that a lot of conservative approach politics and i don't think we should appease the left anyway cometh cometh the hour cometh the man or woman on the right yes who is it i believe that the important thing is the ideas first you know that the right has to agree what the fundamental problem is doesn't it and and no i don't think it does there are people like david starkey who are talking about a great repeal bill there are people out there in the conservators and in reform talking about various aspects of it but i don't think there's enough of a uh broad understanding on the right that the problem is the blairite state and that has to be the central change that any new government's making and i i want to see this country rescued i think we're in serious trouble i want to see the right win at the next election but the the starting point has to be what the right actually do and are they prepared to admit the mistakes you know is kemi prepared to admit that it was wrong for the cameroons to be the heirs to blair yes because that was where the opportunity was missed to repeal the human rights act to get rid of the supreme court that was a huge opportunity it was missed partly due to nick clegg we don't really want to talk about him but i think it's a huge opportunity to get rid of the supreme court that was a huge opportunity who yeah exactly um but then if she does that she risks alienating more moderate tories who might be flirting with ed davy that she needs to win back because she's got reformed to the right of her so it's a difficult and tricky balancing act but when you refer to the right are you actually thinking a combination of the radicalism of reform and the traditionalism of the conservatives might actually produce something that could take on the blob what i'm saying is that the there are still people in the conservative party who are basically part of the progressive establishment they are more interested in kowtowing to the progressive establishment than they are in being conservatives you know people who continue to want net zero policies people who don't really like leaving the echr or repealing the human rights act i've heard nobody i think this is fair in the conservative party really talk about the bank of england and what blair did to that institution so i think there is still a lot of i mean i described the results of uh the 2024 election of survival of the wettest in terms of which conservative mps were left and i think there is still a large element in the conservative party who really aren't conservatives by that logic if the wets survived and the dries got beaten not all the dries got no but that suggests that actually there isn't a basis in the public for support for your kind of politics people can change that minds i think the longer things go on people realize you know we're now we're now on the seventh prime minister in 10 years people are beginning to realize there's a system problem so i think people can change their mind but it's a very difficult situation the right now faces i'm intensely frustrated by it but you know what i want is a less wet though isn't it so are you leaning into reform i'm not i'm focused on convincing the right that this is the change they need in order to get anything done in government but then that requires a coming together so you're more of an advocate of a uniting of the right in some form with a clear figurehead that can make these arguments that can restore good old-fashioned conservative small c large c common sense that's what you seem to be asking well in america you had the tea party movement before donald trump emerged so the movement that believed in those ideas about challenging the kind of status quo of the country club republicans that emerged before donald trump so it may be something else changes who knows i mean politics is so volatile you know did we think we'd be that we'd be where we are now four years ago but the important thing for me is that people on the right understand that the state has been captured by the progressives and unless we reverse blair and brown we're going to get nowhere like just take the obr example you know the obr is fixated on the idea that the more immigration you have the more the economy benefits and that delivers fiscal headroom if you get a right-wing prime minister in who tries to reduce immigration they're going to be told there's no headroom yes to do anything you know that is a problem this is why this institution needs to go i do want to ask uh as we wrap up when a labor leader as they constantly do says well things might not be going well but the liz trust budget is to blame is there any part of you that winces is there any bit of you which is embarrassed at the fact that you have become for the left their best argument for why you should never vote right wing again i don't think it is their best argument i think it shows well they think it is well they but they are they are not on our side tim no and they are fundamentally deluded they're either deluded or they're destructive they're deliberately trying to destroy britain but to have become a synonym for governmental failure even if i thought that was unfair and wrong i'd personally still feel a bit embarrassed would you you do not i don't because i think you know i am the person who's pointing out the problems with the system that is why i i come under such huge attack you know this isn't just the labor party attacking me you know the establishment in britain that is running this country into the ground is also attacking me all the time they're attacking me because i'm right they wouldn't bother attacking me if i was irrelevant liz trust thank you very very much indeed for joining us on the daily tea good to be on thank nine out of ten are you what has happened to you did you think i was wearing my reading glasses by mistake listen no she's a very attractive woman i know i mean at one point i thought you were going to say would you and we would like to know the answer to that question we all have different methods in journalism for getting the answer yeah yours is flattery i i am shameless i can assure you if i had ed davy here i'd be saying i mean come on you're at least a seven seven len gibman turning in his grave i just never know with liz trust i just i mean pardon the expression but she's a salad isn't she she's a mixture of two things she's a mixture of two things she's a mixture of two things she's a mixture of parts part conspiracy theorist yes part actually quite stateswoman like yes there are some succulent cherries in that salad but there's also a couple of nuts there's a it's it's a waldorf salad it's got nuts in it but but then i don't like this i completely sympathize with her position that she is being radical and not being appreciated for it by people who just want her to shut up and go away i admire the persistence of the woman she was prime minister of this country albeit very very briefly i do agree in part with her diagnosis of the blair and brown era i do think and jacob reese mogg would agree with this that if you really want to take on the blob you need a huge kind of legislative bonfire in order to have such radical change you would then need a stonking majority neither party on the right appear to have the numbers by the way labor even with eyelash mcgraw doesn't have the numbers uh we're now going into a situation where someone's calling for pr even though we've naturally got it because of this five-stroke six-party system i don't feel particularly hopeful for the future she's walking out of the studio going maybe we should all leave the country i mean so what i'm saying is there are competing contradictory feelings that i have in my head about this trust on one hand it's all your fault this is why burnham's able to sell this socialist clap chap to the public because you cocked everything up but on the other hand yes i do appreciate what you're saying and i think the banks are going to be able to sell this socialist clap chap to the public because you did behave extremely oddly ahead of that mini budget in a way that they haven't with labor and yes you're right guilt yields are higher now than they ever were under you so you know a labor crashing the economy if labor think that guilt yields reaching above five percent crashes the economy then they're doing exactly the same liz is something very unusual particularly in tory politics which is a true believer she has a philosophy she's motivated by ideas not personality and you can say whatever you like about her she really doesn't care she can't be shamed because she's motored less by personal ambition and vanity although all human beings have a dash of that but more by the power of the ideas themselves themselves. And that's what makes us so unusual. And it's why she was never going to shut up after she lost. And what did we really expect her to do? In a way, it's an odd convention to say that someone who's run a country well or disastrously shouldn't give us the benefit of their experience. And I happen to agree with her analysis. I think she's correct. Part of the problem is when she's then pushed who else shares your analysis, the only person she named was David Starkey. Now, I love David. He's fantastic. And again, I think he's right, but he's just a historian. He's not the leader of a political party. Trussism doesn't yet have purchase within either the Tories or reform. And they're not really talking about the kind of across the board systematic reform of government that she's talking about. But we can't get away, from love her or loathe her. And as much as there is much about her that I find to admire, she has become an easy weapon to deploy against the right or the center right. And sometimes you do wish that that wasn't there and that she might go quiet for a little bit because every time she does appear on TV to say something like we should abolish the Bank of England, it just empowers the it just empowers the left to say that's a reminder. When you had this disastrous period in government. I mean, this is really interesting, isn't it? Because yesterday you and I were discussing the lack of a kind of conservative dialogue on economics. You know, there's been a vacuum for the last 15 to 20 years as conservatives have given up making the case for free markets and capitalism, making very clear and cogent fact right arguments for why socialism is a terrible idea. The one person on the right who's making them quite clearly and quite loudly is Liz Truss. Yes. If they're truly listening or if they are listening, they're reacting with, well, you crashed the economy and you're a bit mad. And the other dimension to this is there is still isn't really a vibrant ecosystem in this country for that kind of conversation. I know we have think tanks. I know we now have two parties on the center right. But where is there an ecosystem for having that conversation? It's America. Yes. So Liz Truss has been drawn into the orbit of Donald Trump, like with heavy MLA, the biggest experiments in politics. Popular capitalism are taking place abroad. They're not happening here. So we've seen an Americanization of Lizzie, to paraphrase the Americanization of Emily. We've seen Liz Truss be Americanized. And I think that's one more reason why the British audience has turned off. Because I think I do feel some of what she says resonates more strongly in Washington, D.C. than it probably resonates in North Norfolk. Well, she seems very MAGA and some of his stardom. And I think that's what we've seen in the last couple of weeks, is that she's very MAGA. Well, that's the other thing. But also, she's clearly admiring of this presidential system. If you want to take on the blob, then what you really need is to be presidential and issue a load of executive orders. Yes. You know, and therefore, if she wants to kind of bypass actual lawmaking because things have got that desperate, that then that worries people because it doesn't seem particularly British. This is the other thing. You know, she's looking at Trump probably with a degree of envy. She's looking at Trump probably with a degree of envy because he was able to do the radical things she wanted to do without being gobbled up and spat out. But his tariffs, plus his war in Iran, have probably contributed to inflation, especially at the petrol pump in the United States. Yeah. Has he brought down the price of eggs? No, I don't think so. He ain't perfect. And who is the other person who the online right point to as an exemplar? It's Xavier Millet. Yeah. I'm not going to dispute the economic revolution, seems from what I've read to have worked. But this is the guy who we might end up going to war with. The war with over the Falklands. Yeah. Yeah. And he's got a chainsaw. But don't worry, we've got a destroyer somewhere. With friends like these, this is the problem with the centre-right, Donald Trump, Liz Truss, Xavier Millet, with friends like these, who needs Andy Burnham? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.