Liz Truss tells David Williamson her big fears for the country (Image: Reach)

Andy Burnham will be as unpopular as Sir Keir Starmer in just six months, former prime minister Liz Truss predicts. There are two key reasons why the ex-Conservative leader is confident Mr Burnham’s bounce in the polls will evaporate. First, “people are getting poorer”. Second, “the country’s getting worse”.

It is a beautiful day in London when we meet in a Mayfair office but Ms Truss, who was in power from September 6 to October 25, 2022, argues Britain’s decline is “very, very serious” – and it will take more than the arrival of a charismatic former mayor in Downing Street to fix the cultural, economic and political crises facing the nation.

“We need to be honest as a country that the state is just completely dysfunctional,” she says.

Ms Truss lays much of the blame for this at the feet of Sir Tony Blair for staging a “quiet revolution”. Fixing Britain, she says, will involve repealing the Human Rights Act and “all of the things Blair did to hand over power to unelected bureaucrats and unelected judges”.

Speaking as someone with first-hand experience of being forced out of office, she says: “It’s much easier to get rid of an elected politician than it is to get rid of the Governor of the Bank of England, and that gives him immense power in our system.”

And commenting on Mr Burnham’s first weeks as PM, she says: “I think you can see from the small boats crisis and this prisoner release crisis that’s taking place, that he’s already coming up against the fact that the system doesn’t work.”

Liz Truss is now an international campaigner for free enterprise and free speech (Image: Philip Coburn/Daily Mirror)

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As we approach the fourth anniversaries of Ms Truss taking and losing power, few would claim the country has enjoyed an economy renaissance in her absence. The national debt was just shy of £3trillion at the end of June (94.9% of GDP); the Government spent around £109billion on debt interest in 2025-26; and the economy grew by a miserable 0.4% in the second quarter of this year.

Ms Truss was pushed out of Number 10 after her government was forced to u-turn on key elements of her mini-Budget. It contained £45billion of tax cuts but was blamed for spooking markets.

“I’ve got absolutely no doubt that if the policies had been allowed to continue, the country would be in a better position,” she says. “I’ve got no doubt.”

Looking back on this time, she says: “It wasn’t just that there were MPs who were weak-willed… There were also people within the Conservative Party [who] were actively trying to thwart the plans. They were the people who’d got rid of Boris, who wanted to install Rishi Sunak. When you’ve got a cabal of people in the party who are actively trying to undermine you, that makes it a lot more difficult.”

Ms Truss remains convinced that “Britain needs to get an economic model that works, which actually generates money rather than piles up debt”. But she doubts whether Britain is ready to accept “tough medicine”.

She faced opposition at the heart of the cabinet when she attempt to limit increases in benefits to earnings growth and not inflation.

“I do slightly despair of whether people are prepared to take the tough medicine and acknowledge the hole we’re in,” she says. “I fear [we] might end up in a crisis like we were in in the 1970s… How much worse does it have to get? Interest payments are astronomical. I do fear that people don’t understand how bad it is.”

Liz Truss was one of the Tories’ brightest rising stars (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)

Far from stepping out of the limelight since the end of her premiership and the loss to Labour – by just 630 votes – of her South West Norfolk constituency, she has recast herself as an international author and speaker, championing free speech and free enterprise, and presenting The Liz Truss Show.

British politics has been transformed since her premiership by the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. She says she wants to see a “successful Right-wing government” take power at the next election, but expresses concern that the Right seems “to like fighting itself, rather than fighting the communists who are trying to take over our country”.

“Not enough people on the Right really understand how deep the rot is and how big the change is going to have to be,” she remarks.

Mr Farage, she suspects, also faces internal opposition: “There are plenty of people trying to undermine him, including, I’ve got no doubt, people within his own party – just like the people who tried to get rid of Boris and ultimately succeeded within the Conservative Party.”

Describing the opposition she encountered in Tory ranks and the wider establishment, she says: “They didn’t agree with fracking, they didn’t agree with cutting the top rate of tax. They didn’t agree with restraining welfare spending. So, that’s a problem in itself, but when you’ve got a state that is embedded with progressive ideology and also is over-powerful, you know, that is a pretty toxic combination.”

She has simple advice for Kemi Badenoch: “The priority, to get Britain back on track, has to be making the bureaucracy accountable again.”

Liz Truss as Foreign Secretary in Estonia (Image: Simon Dawson / No10 Downing Street)

On the international stage, she is alarmed by the rise of China and argues Britain must “pick a side”.

“We need to trade with our allies and cut China out of benefiting from our advanced technology,” she says. “There’s a technology race now between the US and China, particularly in areas like AI. We need the US to win it… “[We] need to get tougher on useful idiots on our side who are essentially collaborating with China.”

A fierce critic of net zero, she claims: “All we’ve done is outsource manufacturing to China. That’s been of no benefit to the British people.”

Would she like to return to full-time politics?

“I don’t want to be in frontline politics if it just means taking all the flak for things that I can’t change,” she says. The key problem facing Britain, she argues, is we have a “bureaucracy that has been taken over by the progressive left”.

Today, she recognises that Britain’s future will not be defined by politics alone. She wants a “bigger army of people to to take on the progressives”.

“What I learned from my time in government,” she explains, “is that it’s not going to be enough just to just to win in politics alone. This is a bigger battle because the Left have infiltrated our universities, they’ve infiltrated the bureaucracy, they’ve infiltrated business as well.”

Liz Truss was in Number 10 for the historic change in monarch (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)

On her show, she has also explored Christianity’s enduring relationship with Britons.

She says: “I think our Christian identity is very important… The things that have made it great are based on Christianity.”

Does she think Christianity is important because it provides values and binds society together, or because it is true?

She looks up and thinks carefully as she answers: “It is true – and it provides a set of values.”

The drama of her premiership should not obscure her remarkable march through many of the most powerful positions in Government – the former Liberal Democrat has been Environment Secretary, Lord Chancellor, Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Foreign Secretary.

During her brief time running the country, she was the last prime minister to greet the late Queen and the first to shake hands with King Charles. Despite the tumult of her career, she gives no sign of regretting entering the political arena.

Today, Ms Truss comes across as a happy warrior in the battle of ideas, and she has no intention of leaving the fight.