A Podcast Appearance That Raised Few Eyebrows
Former prime minister Liz Truss has used her latest media outing to propagate a string of conspiracy theories, claiming that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown orchestrated a secret plot to dismantle British civilisation and that the Conservative Party was, in her words, part of the “woke establishment.”
The remarks came during an appearance on a podcast hosted by ex-Tory Brexiter Steve Baker, who lost his parliamentary seat in 2024. Baker, who has become increasingly marginal in recent years, used the platform to host Truss as his first guest — a pairing that suits two people seemingly unburdened by conventional political thinking.
It was a short-lived spectacle. Only around 2,000 people were estimated to have watched the broadcast, and even fewer likely made it to the end.
A Refusal to Accept Defeat
Truss appears uniquely determined among former prime ministers to rewrite her legacy. Most leaders who leave office after a short and troubled tenure — however briefly — accept a quiet retreat from public life. Not Truss.
She has refused to give up. The last cockroach alive after a nuclear apocalypse, some might say. She hosts her own podcast, makes regular appearances on American conservative media, and has even turned up on Mike Graham’s YouTube channel, where she pretends to take an interest in topics other than herself.
What makes her different is not just the volume of her output but the nature of it. No matter how deranged or delusional the premise, Truss seems confident she can always be more so. She has become every rightwinger’s favourite guest: guaranteed to say yes, and in doing so, to make everyone else appear almost reasonable.
During the latest episode, she insisted that Labour had “ruined the country” and that nothing had been the same since 1997. When Baker — who had to remind her that the Conservatives had been in government from 2010 — pressed further, Truss did not hesitate. The Tories, she argued, were never really the Tories. They were socialists in disguise, all of them, members of a woke establishment that was anti-Brexit and in denial about austerity ever having taken place.
A Distorted View of Her Own History
Perhaps most striking was Truss’s treatment of her own political past. She had served as a minister in successive Tory governments since 2012 and was once a vocal supporter of remaining in the European Union. Those positions, she now suggests, belonged to a different person entirely — a doppelganger temporarily captured by the “wokerati” and compelled to act against her will.
Only when she became prime minister, Truss claims, could she truly self-actualise into her authentic self. Her 49 days in office — the shortest of any British prime minister in living memory — were then thwarted by the Bank of England’s stance on quantitative easing, which she portrays as a deliberate conspiracy to destabilise her mini-budget. The fact that the mini-budget itself was riddled with unfunded tax cuts appears to be a secondary concern.
She is proud of those 49 days. In her mind, she was simply too good for the country. Give it a thousand years, she might reckon, and a 70-metre tapestry chronicling her revisionist history will hang in the British Museum.
The Limits of Influence
At one point during the podcast, Truss named only two people she trusted in the world: Donald Trump and Javier Milei. She argued that the time had come to disband the judiciary, the prisons, and the civil service, and that the entire global order needed rebalancing.
Baker, who suggested the NHS should also be on the table because it had “almost killed” him and a friend, agreed readily. Even he, however, stopped short of endorsing the full extent of Truss’s vision.
When asked whether she would stand for election again, Truss hedged. She may, she said, but who would she stand for? She has long been too extreme for the Conservatives and perhaps too unorthodox even for Reform UK. All she knows is that she will never go away — not while there are still things to discuss that, in her view, nobody is talking about except her.
The problem, though, is not silence. It is that nobody is listening.
It is easy to feel guilty for indulging the spectacle of it. There is something almost unbearably sad about a politician who seems incapable of recognising that people are not laughing with her but at her. She has yet to grasp that her platform has shrunk to a small audience of the already converted.
Steve Baker handed her a nugget of gold, and they both ran for the hills. You will never take them alive.
Why It Matters
Truss’s continued presence in the public conversation may seem like little more than an eccentric sideshow, but it speaks to a broader issue within political discourse: the erosion of shared facts and the normalisation of conspiracy-driven narratives. When a former head of government can assert without consequence that her own party was a vehicle for socialism, or that entire institutions should be disbanded on a podcast with a few thousand listeners, it raises questions about accountability and the lines between fringe ideology and mainstream politics. Her willingness to say anything — and to say it with conviction — sets a troubling benchmark. The more such voices go unchallenged, the more they risk pulling the Overton window not just to the right, but beyond the frame entirely.