Eighteen months have passed since Liz Truss left Downing Street and after an initial period of silence, she has been making up for lost time. In recent months, Truss has tabled a bill in parliament, launched her own ‘Popular Conservatism’ movement and even done the lecture circuit in the US. And now, at last, the former PM has released her long-awaited memoirs, detailing what went wrong in office and who is really to blame. Ten Years to Save the West sets out Truss’s philosophy for a better Conservatism and a better world – and the former Prime Minister has sat down with The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson in her very first TV interview about the book.

Here are the highlights of what she had to say…

Ukraine would be ‘safer’ with Trump in charge

As Foreign Secretary, Truss was a staunch supporter of Ukraine, arguing that she was always ‘on the more hawkish side of how we deal with Russia’. But in her bid to be a supporter of Kyiv, she has found some interesting allies – including one Donald Trump. Now ‘the Donald’ is often seen as a sceptic of further aid to Ukraine but Truss thinks that Trump’s actions are more important ‘than all of the rhetoric’:

What I would say about Donald Trump is judge him on his actions rather than all of the rhetoric. You know, he’s a he’s a unique style of politician, I think we can say. But I certainly feel having served as Secretary of State under a Trump administration and under a Biden administration, I think the world was safer when Trump was in charge. And I also think that is true with respect to Iran. I think the Biden administrations have shown weakness on Iran, and that has led to the situation we’ve seen in the Middle East. So I’m not going to spend this interview justifying every bit of rhetoric Trump says. But in my own experience of being in government, I felt that the US was a stronger force under Trump.

I’m not going to spend spend the time analysing the rhetoric. What I think is that when Trump was in office, he was more successful at dealing with the authoritarian regimes in the world, namely China, Russia and Iran. I think the current White House has not shown enough strength in the face of that. And that’s not just you know military strength. It’s also economic strength. So, you know, the recent visit by Janet Yellen to China, the cosying up to China, the meetings with American corporates and the Chinese authorities, I worry about that. You know, there is not the moral clarity that there was when President Reagan called out the evil empire. There just isn’t. And that is a problem. There’s a lack of moral clarity coming from the free world at the moment.’

Lee Anderson should not have been kicked out of the Tory party

Lee Anderson was a notable figure at Truss’s recent Popular Conservatism launch event – but what she does think of his recent move to the Farage-founded Reform UK party? Was it a mistake to suspend Anderson from the party over his ‘Islamist’ comments, essentially forcing him out of the party? ‘I think it would be better if he was still a member of the Conservative party, yes,’ Truss said.

On the gap between Reform and the Tories in the polls, Truss added: ‘We can’t say everything’s fine because it’s not fine. We’ve delivered good stuff but we need to be bolder. I want to see a more robust Conservative manifesto.’

So, can Truss envisage a Canadian style wipeout come the election?

I don’t think that, no, I don’t think that because I want the Conservatives to do as well as possible at the election. Just to be clear, I think Keir Starmer would turbocharge the administrative state and do all sorts of dreadful things. I want the Conservatives to win. I want us to have more robust policies. On everything from tax to net zero to immigration, wokery, etc. so I want us to have all those robust policies so I think that’s the direction we need to go in. I think Reform has emerged because we’re not being clear enough about that and we’re not doing those things.

The Supreme Court should be abolished

The problem facing the Tory government, Truss believes, is that it hasn’t been able to enact enough change because ‘there’s far too much power in the hands of people who aren’t elected’. It is ‘the definition of a technocracy,’ the former PM said, before adding: ‘Who is setting economic policy? I would argue it’s Richard Hughes [Chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility] and Andrew Bailey [Governor of the Bank of England].’

Truss went on to rebut the argument that the entire Rwanda policy isn’t deliverable, and instead blamed the courts for flights not having taken off. This is just one example of unelected groups delaying government policy, she believes. ‘I can wish for a world where the Supreme Court no longer exists,’ Truss said. ‘And I do wish for that.’ Quite something for a former Lord Chancellor to say…

Truss wouldn’t have announced her mini-Budget if she knew about the LDI situation

Truss’s premiership began and ended with her infamous mini-Budget. But she now says that she wouldn’t have let it take place had she known what she subsequently discovered: namely, the vulnerability of the UK  pension market to LDIs or liability-driven investments. The former PM blames the Bank of England for not addressing the ‘financial markets problem’ and, speaking frankly, Truss admitted: ‘If I’d known that the LDI situation was there as a massive iceberg on the horizon, of course I wouldn’t have driven the vessel into it.’

Braverman was unrealistic on immigration 

While Truss agreed with Braverman that the number of migrants coming into the UK needed to be reduced, the former PM hit out at her Tory colleague for having unrealistic ambitions for immigration – to get numbers down to the tens of thousands per year – ‘which, frankly, [was] not going to happen in the next two years’. Truss slammed the ‘practical problem’ of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s ‘poor quality modelling’ that was based on Braverman’s expectations, which ‘meant that there was less money in the accounts’.

Watch the full interview here: