Trussonomic lessons: what can be learned from former PM’s book?

At the heart of Liz Truss’s new book, Ten Years to Save the West, the former prime minister reckons this is the reason for Britain’s economic drift, alongside “unelected technocrats” overruling the “wishes of the people”.

The UK’s main economic institutions – the Treasury, Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility(a “three-headed hydra”) – come under fire for standing in the way of her project, launched not with an election mandate but a Tory party selection process.

Government bond yields had been climbing in the summer of 2022 as the world’s leading central banks raised interest rates to combat soaring inflation after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Over four days, long-dated government bond yields rose by more than the annual increase in 23 of the past 27 years, in a “ doom loop ” as the financial crisis started to feed on itself before the Bank of England stepped in.

In a book railing against short-termism and institutions, Truss reveals she thought about abolishing the OBR and sacking the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, but concluded such a “declaration of war on the economic establishment” would have taken time she did not have.

Britain has grown to “defer to the revered cult of the technocrat”, Truss writes, with the OBR and the Treasury the pinnacle in a Whitehall establishment full of leftwing “quangocrats” reliant on flawed economic models.