A duration of 100 minutes for The Last Days of Liz Truss? amounting to about two minutes for each day that its subject was prime minister. Similarly, a drama about Margaret Thatcher – Truss’s heroine, whose portrait hangs from the set – would last almost a week. That would be an amount as unsustainable as those in the budget that led to such a short premiership, while this Greg Wilkinson-penned monologue pleasantly justifies its economy.
Truss’ time in office in 2022 has now been detailed in four books, including her own Ten Years to Save the West, Anthony Seldon’s Trot at Number 10: How Not to Be Prime Minister, Out by Tim Shipman and Kingmaker by Sir Graham Brady, who as chairman of the committee from 1922, was the Tory executioner. Having read them all (a mildly alarming realization), I can attest that Wilkinson skillfully fleshed out the story to both comic (a politician’s passion for karaoke) and serious (her apocalyptic patriotism and economics) effect.
The conceit is Truss lecturing us while he waits for Brady to knock on the door. Emma Wilkinson-Wright captures Truss’ awkward gait and excitable speech well, including the hard “g” sound, but no attempts at random ambush giggles. The psychological arc is how childhood overconfidence developed into the belief that being told she was wrong—especially by government officials—proved her right.
A consequence of the form of the monologue is that Truss appears on his own terms. Tourists might wonder how the country’s voters allowed this politician to reach the top, but they didn’t: Trots reached No. 10 via 81,326 Conservative Party members whose prejudices her campaign was targeting. Claiming she was ousted from power by the “deep state”, she was put there by a shallow faction. The biggest lesson from the mess involves the rules the Tories use to change the prime minister between elections, but Truss would never understand that.
The only outside perspective is a soundtrack of recorded voices by impressionist Steve Nallen, including his Thatcher, a party piece from Spitting Image here, but also a take-off by Kwasi Kwarteng, Jacob Rees-Mogg and general officials and journalists.
Always alert to the comedy of Truss’s character and career, Wilkinson allows her to defend herself, showing how she was thrown from the presidency on the Queen’s death and including Truss’s view (reflected by Shipman) that the Treasury was slow to advise on the risk to the budget from overexposed pension funds.
The last days of Liz Truss? explored in its headline the possibility of a Trump-like comeback. While she waits, the politician has signed on with a speaking agency, but anyone who wants to hear from her would be better off booking Wilkinson Wright’s remarkable replacement.