Liz Truss lashed out at an interviewer, accusing her of talking “b******s” over her record in Cabinet. Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister appeared on Julia Hartley Brewer’s Talk TV show on Monday, and the two exchanged fiery words over Ms Truss’s time in Government during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ms Hartley Brewer said: “With all due respect, on lockdown, perhaps that greatest, biggest event of our lifetimes, you were very quiet. I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I could have lost my job, I could have lost my livelihood, we could have lost our YouTube page. I was being absolutely attacked nonstop. You stayed shtum; I didn’t. So don’t blame all the media. Some of us were speaking out.”
Ms Truss replied: “I respect you for that, Julia. At the time, I was trade secretary, and I had to get a hundred, almost a hundred trade deals done in a year, and I was pretty much the only person still travelling during COVID, on empty planes, going around the world trying to sort out our–“
Cutting her off, Ms Hartley Brewer said she had been told that she had not spoken out against lockdown in Cabinet.
“Well, that’s b******s,” Ms Truss replied. “That is absolute b******s. I did speak up in Cabinet.”
Ms Truss wrote in her book “10 Years to Save the West”: “The dictatorial excesses during the Covid‑19 lockdowns should have been a stark warning because they are a precursor of things to come if conservatives continue to waffle on principle, surrender on policy, and fail with the electorate.”
She has said since the pandemic that measures were too “draconian”.
Reflecting on his decision to impose lockdown in his book Unleashed, Boris Johnson wrote: “If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, I was a libertarian who had been mugged by Covid.”
He added: “Lockdown was more or less OK for some – for the relatively affluent furlough‑cocooned middle classes who could watch Netflix and make banana bread and drink rosé wine in the garden.”