It’s easy to laugh at Liz Truss bringing out a book, much harder to ask whether there are points she makes that Westminster can actually learn from. The former prime minister obviously has a self-awareness problem which leads her to blame her failures on anyone and everyone who happened to be around at the time. That makes it much easier to dismiss the whole thing. But there are arguments – particularly within the final chapter – that we haven’t just heard from Truss, or indeed just from Conservatives. Even previous Labour leaders have complained about the resistance from the civil service to reforms.

Speaking of previous prime ministers, one of the problems with Truss’s book is that she doesn’t consider how other leaders or indeed ministers have managed to triumph with their radical reforms. Her analysis is largely limited to what stopped her, rather than a full-scale assessment of how to exert power in Westminster. The text suggests that she thinks the reforms of the past 20 or 30 years have been pretty pointless, small beer, so perhaps she doesn’t think any prime ministers are worth learning from at all.

Truss describes ‘a Conservative party that had lost its compass’

Her criticism of the establishment isn’t just limited to the officials advising ministers. Truss is almost as annoyed by her own Tory colleagues. She describes ‘a Conservative party that had lost its compass and instead turned on itself and a bureaucratic state that was becoming increasingly bold in challenging and obstructing elected politicians.’ She then says that this obstruction is preventing ‘building more homes and reforming the planning system, rowing back on net zero, stopping the boats coming across the Channel and controlling immigration, cutting corporate taxes,’ and so on. She doesn’t offer an analysis of whether the Tories turning on themselves or the civil service are more responsible for this, though. Arguably the repeated refusal of a large section of the Conservative party to vote for planning reform, for instance, has a lot more to do with this agenda never progressing, rather than the manoeuvrings of civil servants.

But there are other points that are at least worth answering. Should prime ministers and cabinet ministers have the power to appoint their senior civil servants, for instance? What is the accountability of the many institutions and agencies that deliver a great deal of government policy? That question covers the Bank of England, which is right at the top of Truss’s hit list in this book. Her particular reasons for resenting the unaccountability (and higher salary) of the Bank’s Governor might not be all that valid: she largely blames Andrew Bailey for her Growth Plan falling apart and her own premiership collapsing shortly afterwards. But it’s not unreasonable to ask whether the balance of accountability is currently right.

It is on making politics an attractive line of work that I find the most common ground with Truss. She is right to wonder whether the higher salary and lower accountability of senior civil servants lead talented individuals to eschew parliamentary politics for Whitehall life instead. She is also irritated by the way the state is supposed to run on a shoestring, and woe betide a prime minister who thinks they need to beef up their advisers, or who thinks an official UK government plane would be better than chartering one at a regular higher cost.

Truss also wants Conservative associations to interrogate candidates on how they might vote on certain policies, not just how well they’ll campaign for their local area. There is a whole industry now on prepping candidates to talk about the local roads and wards in their prospective seats, though anecdotally those who chair selections say often the wannabe MPs who’ve splashed thousands of pounds on these services aren’t selected after all. Truss wants this change in focus so that the Conservative party should return to being properly Conservative – or at least Conservative in the way she interprets it. But what associations really should be doing to ensure their candidate is going to make politics work better is to question their ability and enthusiasm for scrutinising legislation. That would help stop bad policies reaching their constituents in the first place. I suspect, though, that Truss would be less keen on that, as it might mean there were even more ways to force a prime minister to sharpen their arguments for big reforms, something she doesn’t manage to do in her book.