Liz Truss has shown what she learnt from her time in No 10 - nothing

She’s back. Liz Truss, MP for South West Norfolk, one-time pork peddler and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 56th prime minister of the United Kingdom, today delivers a speech in Washington on how the “anti-growth movement” is emboldening China.

All the greatest hits are there in the lines pre-briefed to the media (“greatest hits”, in Truss’s case, being slightly more Bluetones than Beatles). She will talk about how low taxes won the Cold War (low taxes did not win the Cold War). She will warn how authoritarian regimes are being allowed to rise again because the model was being “strangled into stagnation” by redistribution and woke culture. Quite apart from anything else, it is unclear how anything, not least an economic model, can be “strangled into stagnation”.

“The sad truth is that we have seen stagnation, redistributionism and woke culture taking hold in businesses and the economy in the UK and the US,” she will tell her audience at the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank. What does she mean by “woke” in this context? Things which have been described as “woke” in the UK press this week alone have included Nike using a trans model in an ad campaign, a Leeds primary school banning the playing of tag following a string of injuries, a new TV reboot of Grease having a multicultural cast and socks bearing positive quotes in Australian Rules Football. Are these responsible for stagnation?

It’s unlikely Truss knows what she means. It’s meaningless; a word soup. A succession of culture war phrases designed to tickle the bellies of the Mail, Telegraph and the Conservative base during a leadership election which proved no substitute for statecraft or even basic competence in the actual running of the country.

And yet here they are, rolled out again as Truss tries to reinvent herself as the intellectual elder statesperson of the Conservative Party. Who are the “anti-growth movement” giving such succour to China? The only avowedly anti-growth party in the UK is the Scottish Greens, and it seems unlikely Xi Jinping devotes much of his time to thinking about them.

The sheer chutzpah of the 50-day PM traversing the globe to dispense her unique wisdom to those fortunate (and rich) enough to receive it would be almost admirable, were she not serving up such lamentable, disprovable tosh. The hubris, the entire absence of humility show what Liz Truss has learnt from her historically disastrous time in Downing Street – absolutely nothing. So there she is, jet-setting the Western world, selling her brand of discredited libertarianism when what she really, really, should be doing is taking a very lengthy vow of silence.