Former leader Liz Truss backs Trump, blames others for her ouster after 49 days

LONDON (AP): During her 49 days as Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, Liz Truss sparked mayhem on the financial markets and turmoil within her Conservative Party.

Now she is speaking up, and her message is: It wasn’t me.

In interviews and a new book, Truss robustly defends her economic record, blaming the “deep state”, “technocrats”, “the establishment”, civil servants and the Bank of England for her downfall.

“I’m not saying I’m perfect,” Truss told the BBC. But, she added, “I’m frankly not going to let them get off the hook.”

Traditionally, former British prime ministers keep quiet for an extended period after leaving office. Not Truss. In her grandly titled tome, Ten Years to Save the West — the former prime minister defends her actions, excoriates her many critics, and offers her prescription for a better world.

Her ideas include abolishing the United Nations and backing Donald Trump for re-election — a departure from the convention that senior British politicians stay out of US elections.

“I believe that we need a strong America,” Truss told the BBC, adding that “the world was safer” when Trump was president.

“I think that our opponents feared the Trump presidency more than they fear the Democrats being in office,” she said.

Truss became prime minister in September 2022 when she was elected by the governing Conservative Party to replace Boris Johnson after he was toppled by scandals.

Her promise to spur economic growth with tax cuts and deregulation enthused Tory members, but a budget containing 45 billion pounds ($54 billion) in unfunded tax cuts rocked the financial markets, drove up the cost of government borrowing, and sent the pound to its lowest-ever level against the dollar.

The Bank of England had to step in to prop up the bond market and prevent a wider economic meltdown. Millions of people still have higher mortgage payments because of the soaring interest rates.

In October 2022, Truss resigned and was replaced by Rishi Sunak, the rival she’d defeated just a couple of months earlier.

Truss has found plenty of other people to blame. She said that the central bank had kept interest rates too low, while the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)— which provides the government with economic forecasts — had failed to warn her that British pension funds were heavily exposed to interest-rate fluctuations.

She is calling for the OBR to be abolished and for Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey to resign.

Truss wants to abolish the UK’s Supreme Court and let the government appoint the judiciary.

She’s also called for the abolition of Britain’s Human Rights Act and urged the United Kingdom to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. She also wants to ax the UN, whose Security Council, she told the BBC, is “positively damaging”.