The Liz Truss Show - the worst thing to hit YouTube in its 20 years

Liz Truss has started her own YouTube show. Harrowing news, the sort of thing you’d only want to hear sitting down while somebody kind held your hand. If there was any justice in the world, we’d all be allowed to just quietly put the Truss era, those 49 heady days in 2022, into the memory hole and leave it there. Alas. She’s back.

While she’s been out of sight and out of mind, Truss has been cleaning up on the right-wing speaking circuit in the US on MAGA-friendly topics like how woke and foreigners are ruining everything. She also gets the ex-prime ministerial entitlement to an allowance that funds their public duties, to the tune of £100,000 a year. All of which makes it somewhat surprising that The Liz Truss Show, the first instalment of which was uploaded last night, looks so extraordinarily cheap. In this first episode, which is titled “London is Falling”, Truss appears in front of a copy of her own book from behind a desk, reading overtly from an autocue. “You’d have to be watching the fake news BBC, or living on Elon Musk’s Mars mission to not know that Britain is going to hell in a handcart,” she tells us. A logo hovers in the top right corner that you or I could knock up in Microsoft Word. “Welcome to the home of the counter revolution,” which is apparently a drably lit room that would be considered snug for a downstairs toilet.

The rest of this opening monologue, delivered with the charm of a wet towel, runs through a starter pack of far-right talking points. Industrial towns being killed off by “eco-zealots”, the vague but apparently terrifying workings of “the deep state” and the “intellectual elite”, that Britain is “importing Islamists who want to destroy our country”, that speaking out against “transgender ideologues” will land a person in jail. She trips over her words and just carries on, which suggests that, somehow, this was the best take.

The remainder of the episode sees Truss interview three right-wing talking heads, first Matt Goodwin, then Peter McCormack, a podcaster and “bitcoin expert” who is wearing a T-shirt that reads “freedom”, and ex-Ukip politician Alex Phillips. A pot plant sits between them looking as if it would like to blink twice for help, and a MAGA hat hangs on a hook almost, but not quite, out of frame over Truss’s right shoulder. It’s 45 minutes long and you feel every second of it.

She claims that she’s embarked on this YouTube venture because “the growth of independent media is really really important,” to counter the “Trotskyite” BBC, yada yada. But I think the way to understand why Truss has made this show, other than out of the classic conspiracy theorist’s yearning to make their bonkers views heard, is that it is an audiovisual cover letter addressed to Donald Trump. She mentions him frequently, claiming that Britain needs and wants a “Trump revolution”.

It seems highly unlikely to me, however, that this show is going to have a wide appeal among MAGA types on either side of the Atlantic. Two and a half hours after airing, this first episode had 1,332 views, a calculable percentage of which will have come from, well, people like me, members of Truss’s much-loathed media cabal who are literally being paid to watch it. If you’re into small boats rhetoric and hang-wringing content about raising the birth rate, you already have so many more eloquent nutters, more possessed of a kind of demonic alt-right charisma, to pick from. And I dare say that YouTube will be only too glad to serve them to you.