Free speech champion Truss slaps Starmer with legal letter

Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it former prime minister Liz Truss has long been a doughty campaigner for free speech, posting on X last year, as a series of riots saw people jailed for public order offences: “I am appalled by the attacks on free speech in Britain and Europe. We can’t be truly free without free speech.”

Later that year she signed an open letter condemning Brazil’s short-lived X ban, saying “freedom of expression is not negotiable”, condemned campaigners Led By Donkeys’ beaming of a lettuce image behind her as she gave a talk as “suppressing free speech” and backed Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson in her battle with police over a dodgy social media post, describing it as “an affront to free speech”.

And as prime minister she vowed to water down draft legislation designed to make the internet safer, citing restrictions on free speech, only to be denied the chance by her historically short tenure.

So it is presumably an entirely different Liz Truss who today sent a legal letter to Keir Starmer demanding he stop claiming that she crashed the economy during her brief tenure in Downing Street, saying it was “false and defamatory”.

The letter from Truss’s lawyers, cited by the Telegraph, says: “We are writing in relation to statements you have made publicly in respect of our client which have caused and will likely continue to cause serious harm to her reputation.

“Of particular concern are the false and defamatory public statements you made about our client in the lead-up to the UK general election from late May 2024, at a time when you knew or ought to have known that those statements were false and the statements were likely to materially impact public opinion of our client whilst she was standing as the parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party in South West Norfolk.”

The letter makes reference to how Starmer claimed many times during last year’s election campaign that “Liz Truss crashed the economy”.

The letter ends: “The statements are defamatory and are causing continuing damage to our client’s reputation.”

And as for Pearson herself, the nation’s self-appointed Free Speech Campaigner-in-Chief? She’s thrown her lot in with Truss and the UK’s defamation industry, backing her on X and inviting evangelical Brexiteer economist Andrew Lilico on to her Planet Normal podcast to explain how, actually, Truss had done a splendid job on the economy.

Viva free speech!

PS Liz Truss crashed the economy.