On Liz Truss’s Face

I stared deep into Liz Truss’s eyes, and, to my horror, found only Liz Truss staring back.

Being humiliated is not everyone’s kink, but watching others be humiliated is more popular that we might want to believe. Normally, we’re not comfortable with the sensations it arouses in us, thank god. We would all like to regard ourselves as good people, moved instinctively to find the suffering of others objectionable. Yet there are times when we know. When we know we are enjoying it, and the attempt to present otherwise, to maintain decorum, only fertilises our schadenfreude, especially when we admonish others for it. But in politics, the face can betray things – real, interpersonal truths – that ideology and bluster and years of media training attempt to hide. Our faces speak to each other with human emotions that can’t be denied. And so I studied Liz Truss’ face this morning on the news, waiting to feel something.

A more obvious subject for our epicaricacy would be Jacob Rees Mogg, whose downfall is measurably more pleasurable, objectively speaking. Yet looking for a human emotion on his face is pointless, not because he isn’t human, but because he’s a man bred to hide such emotions. Not just a pure nepo-baby but an Eton boy to his bones, he has adopted the sort of performed confidence characteristic of everyone who succeeds as a life-long public schoolboy who is handed his destiny on a plate in his nursery by Daddy (via Nanny). In reality, Rees Mogg is a man of ruthless, 21st century economic pragmatism, much fonder of the riches of disaster capitalism than the limited returns of a patrician One Nation conservatism of the Shires. His goal in life is money and power, something he’s not as good at as he’d like to make out, but his real talent lies in performing as someone else – a lost Victorian, a traditionalist, a conservative – appealing to the strange class sentimentalities of his electorate, sentimentalities he exploits but doesn’t share. “Jacob’s great for the business,” said Dominic Johnson, his colleague at Somerset Capital Management, “we have a far higher profile than we ever would if we didn’t have him involved.” An eminent performer, at his vote count he maintained a dignified, hail-fellow-well-met Tory persona, as though the loss of his seat wasn’t a personal blow. And no doubt, because it wasn’t: while his constituents might have intended it to sting, it will have little negative effect on the man’s life. He can now leave parliament to spend more time with his wife’s money while waiting for his inevitable ennoblement, a handy British compromise that allows establishment figures to retain political power despite their explicit rejection at the hands of the electorate. There is a type of Englishman who only fails upwards, and our joy rang hollow.

Truss, on the other hand, was staring down the barrel of history. The votes counted, all the candidates appeared on stage, as is tradition in British elections. Truss was notable by her absence, a clear indicator of bad news ahead. In the audience, supporters of her opponents had begun to slow clap. Eventually, Truss herself appeared and slid to the side of the stage, her face drained of blood. The eyes remained fixed at some point in the middle distance. Her lips remained fixed too, pursed in her characteristically uncanny expression that she uses when attempting to disguise a truer expression. In her official portrait as Prime Minister, it looked as those she was holding back a grin from the left side of her mouth; at the vote count, it looked as though, were she to move a single muscle, her bottom lips with begin to quiver and break with grief. Unlike Rees Mogg, Truss hasn’t been trained since childhood to disguise all her internal life behind an exterior of pure confidence. She was a comprehensive school student; indeed, it’s the way that she has navigated her career which explains just why the look in her eyes last night was nudging towards terror.

Being career-focused is hardly unusual in politics. With fewer and fewer MPs having had real jobs outside of politics before being elected, the fact she first stood for Parliament aged 26 isn’t unusual. Yet her political journey has been one marked by shifting ideological positions that emerged, shall we say, with the prevailing wind. An early attachment to the Liberal Democrats and even Republicanism (an almost verboten position within mainstream UK politics) was ditched while at Oxford University (of course) while studying PPE (of fucking course). Once deciding on becoming a Conservative activist her position moved sharply; she supported Michael Portillo’s leadership campaign in 2005, and by 2011 was the co-founder of the Free Enterprise Group, a Thatcherite ginger group aiming at introducing a hard-line neoliberal economic shock to the British economy, and reaping the benefits. When, through the machinations of a collapsing party, she became leader of the Tories and Prime Minister in September 2022, she stuffed her cabinet with loyalists (including Rees Mogg) and began implementing the FEG shock doctrine in an emergency mini-budget. At its core was an ideologically determined gamble: that the £45 billion in unfunded tax cuts would pay for itself in stimulated growth. The market response to her supply-side Trussonomics was instant and devastating, plunging the economy into a crisis and forcing the pound to a historical low against the dollar. By the end of October she was out.

Now it’s the middle of election night and on the stage, her eyes are shifting left to right, rapidly but almost imperceptibly. It looks painful, and my own emotions are jockeying too, thank god, about time, haha! but also christ, the anxiety, what misery, to live your destruction live on TV. I can almost see the swelling in the frontal lobe of her brain as it races at a million miles an hour, firing at her commands and reassurances, don’t cry, soon over, and the smell of the carpets in her office in Downing St suddenly recalled, where once she was Prime Minister, and now, this school gymnasium, and what next? Unlike Rees Mogg, she doesn’t have a finance career or family name or portfolio or that unearned but uncut confidence to fall back upon. A bead of sweat seems to erupt on her forehead, blood draining and skin clammy to the touch. Is it over yet? Or worse – my god, it is over. For a moment, the chaos that she sowed into the lives of working people is delivered back upon herself.

Her name at last. Truss, Liz, the Conservative Party, 11,217. An audible groan of pity rises from the audience, although not loud enough to cover the laughter. It could be a Greek tragedy – the mortal who gave everything for power, but then, to her horror, tasted it, just for a second on her lips – but for its tempo and scale. She was not a giant cut short, but a small person accidentally and temporarily magnified. It is a comedy, her hubris returned with such slapstick speed that we barely had time to register the ladder slipping away beneath her, the piano falling down the stairs, the banana skin sliding across the pavement. The lettuce hadn’t even begun to rot. But now, the camera lingers on her face for us all, stiff as the Great Stone Face, as the rickety house falls down around her. Face forward, Liz, the prefrontal cortex implores, her heart racing. For a moment, she seems overtaken with a sudden weariness too, as her eyelids dip, sweet bedtime, before returns the great realisation, powering forward like a freight train into her consciousness, to history, my whole life story will be a pub quiz footnote, a punchline, a snorted byword for a fuck-up. She shakes the hand of the winning Labour candidate, and exists the stage without a word, her last chance at a photo-op uncharacteristically rebuffed.

I went back to the beginning again and again, looking at this woman, once the most powerful politician in the country, chauffered to an audience with the Queen, now held to account in front of her constituents. I stared deep into Liz Truss’s eyes, and, to my horror, found only Liz Truss staring back. There was no monster nor genius there, no great plan nor overwhelming will to power, just a very ordinary person, full of humiliation, fear, and complicity.

We could talk about the harm 14 years of Tory rule have done to the lives of British people (and not just British people). We could present any number of indicators of the damage they have done to the country’s economy, the near catastrophe they’ve rolled out in health and social care, the misery they’ve brought into the lives of regular people through their welfare policies, the ongoing inhumanity of their immigration strategy. But I’ll present one concrete indicator I saw recently; the programme of austerity and cuts to the welfare state in Britain have been so bad that children raised under the outgoing government are shorter than they were a decade ago as a result of malnutrition. In 2022, 10,000 people were hospitalised in the UK with malnutrition, with historical diseases like rickets and scurvy reappearing in British hospital wards. It quite simply was that bad.

But anyone who lives in Britain knows it, and has seen it (although some pretend not to), written in the faces of their own families, friends and neighbours. Those are the faces to we should really turn to and read for emotion in their responses to yesterday’s election result. Honestly, I hold out little hope for the actual necessary transformation of Britain occurring under the next Labour government. But thank god they are gone. Today, for a moment at least, we can note our own emotional response at seeing that sometimes, rarely, but sometimes at least, bad things do happen to bad people.

‘Utopian Drivel’ is written by me, Huw Lemmey. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support. Please do forward this to anyone who might enjoy it.

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