The broken psychology of Liz Truss

We are learning about the limits of self-awareness at the furthest reaches of the human experience

Liz Truss is no longer a political matter. There is absolutely nothing to be learned politically from her. She is now fascinating exclusively for psychological reasons. She is a journey into the bleakest and most mortifying possibilities of the human condition, a guide to what happens when the internal self comes totally unmoored from its social context.

We owe her, in a way. She has brought back the possibilities of personality analysis to British political life. We've had a long stretch of leaders who were so psychologically boring that it never felt worth the bother. But this is ultimately a recent development. Once upon time they used to be more interesting. 

Take Tony Blair, for instance. At first glance, he seemed like a simple car salesman - flashy smile, detached eyes, daytime TV manner. But once he was in power it became clear that there was much more to him. He believed firmly in the things he was proposing, but the things he believed firmly in never quite tallied up. There was the pragmatic centrism of his domestic programme and the black-and-white, fire-and-brimstone moral simplicity of his foreign programme. And behind all that, a messianic zeal, an Catholic-tinged sense of mission. There was a lot to uncover in Blair. Even now, decades later, you can sit down and talk it out and come to really quite varied positions about what motivated him.

Gordon Brown was easier to read and yet deeply tragic in what that reading entailed. He was the genius who could not master the spotlight, nor control himself outside of it. You often see really successful partnerships composed of a backroom technical whizz and a front-facing salesman - the person who comes up with the idea and the person who sells it. Brown was the former but demanded to be the latter. So he battled and bullied and sabotaged his own government until he could take it over and then it all fell apart upon him, as if he’d been written by some unoriginal playwright. 

These two men were not just fascinating in their own right, but in combination. For years, the Blair-Brown psychodrama engulfed the country. The entirety of our policy debate took place within the shadow of their suspicions and resentments, their internecine power-grabs and counter-attacks. In terms of politics, it was extremely tedious - there really was barely any difference between them at all - but psychologically it was fascinating. It had that exquisite sense of tragedy that comes from knowing that they could have accomplished so much more by working together than they ever did by fighting one another.

And then the Conservatives came to power and the psychological dimension of British political life dwindled. What was there to say, positive or negative, about these people that was in any way interesting? What facet of the human experience did they reveal which we hadn't seen countless times before? 

David Cameron was an entitled aristocrat. Nothing more. His opinions were typical of his class, as were his skills and his assurance that they would all be allowed to play out to the greatest possible range in the society in which he lived. He was one of those men who had been so fortunate for so long that they came to believe that their advantage was a rule of the natural world. He could therefore take big chances in the certainty that it would all end in its optimal state and eventually one of those big chances predictably blew up in his face. And yet even after the referendum he could potter in his shed, or make obscene sums lobbying for private firms, or simply be granted a lordship and re-enter politics at the highest level. His defeats were far greater than most men's victories. It's presumably all very enjoyable for him, but it was catastrophic for the rest of us and more than that: it was deeply, unconscionably boring. An entirely predictable set of attributes playing out in an entirely predictable way leading to an entirely predictable set of outcomes.

Theresa May can probably lay claim to being the most interesting of the Tory leaders, but that alone means very little because the bar is so low. Her personality was tedious in the extreme. She has now attempted to present herself as the moderate pragmatic force within Conservatism during the Brexit years, with the only defect in her account being the entirety of her actions through the period. She operated consistently to harshen asylum policy, attack immigrants and encourage the nativist mindset, a political boil oozing pus and claiming it as medicine. Her weakness came because she would not finally go all the way. Having fed the populist dragon, she finally blanched at the demand that she carve up the UK's territorial integrity and tried to adopt a compromise position. But by then, of course, it was too late, and the culture she had helped create ate her alive.

Instead, it fell to a man with no standards, with no moral or political or social baseline, to deliver on the project which had defined the Conservative party. Boris Johnson is stupendously uninteresting because he is precisely the thing you think he is: someone whose only guidance is the pursuit of his own advantage. No principle mattered to him, nor any conviction. So he shapeshifted endlessly, from the man who banned booze on the Tube to the one this week making the case for libertarianism on smoking, from the pro-immigration London mayor to the nativist Brexit leader. Nothing meant anything. He's the id come crashing out of the skull, imposing its demands upon the body. He's the petulant child in every one of us, the deep-inside brain that refuses to share, the stroppy little internal voice that thinks it's all so unfair, the embarrassing daydreams of glory half formed while staring out a bus window. He is the retreat of British political culture back into the womb.

Truss at first seemed like a joke. Hapless, ineffectual, politically vacuous, genuinely mad, hopelessly uncharismatic. She wasn't even a bad politician. She was like a crude impersonation of a bad politician by a terrible actor. The layers of her inadequacy were endless. You would peel one away - principles, say, or policy - and then find another lying underneath: a Russian doll made of shite. But there wasn't ultimately anything that interesting about her. She was ideologically unhinged, but then so what? Terribly common nowadays. She was shapeshifting and self-serving, but then who cares? She'd never be able to demonstrate those qualities to a greater extent than her predecessor. She was uncommonly inadequate in presentational matters, but then why fuss? We'd seen May cough her way through a disastrous conference speech, so this was hardly a new area for us. Truss embarrassed us all, made everyone poorer and then pissed off. Story over.

And yet it wasn't. Because outside of power she has become psychologically compulsive. We've all stopped listening to what she says when she does an interview. Instead, we find ourselves staring in disbelief at her eyes. There's nothing there. There isn't the faintest hint of embarrassment or self doubt, there isn't a flicker of self awareness. And it feels like we are learning something important about the limitations of self-awareness at the furthest reaches of the human experience. 

Politics demands a certain kind of imperviousness. Even journalism does to a certain degree. These are both jobs where a core part of your daily experience involves people telling you that you're a twat. They might do it on Twitter, or Facebook, or in a TV interview, or on the street, or even in the Whips Office, but they will do it. Needless to say, you need a certain thickness to your skin for that. You need people with a very strong inner conviction in their own ability that insulates them from self doubt.

We're all engaged in this issue. If you have social media, you will understand it. If you're so thin skinned that you cannot handle any criticism, you will die out there - it doesn't matter if you have 50 followers or 5 million. But if you harden the skin too much you become almost psychotic, completely disconnected from the world in which you operate. There are certain commentators and columnists who have made this error: they've hardened past the point of psychological health, delving into the shallower waters of sociopathy. 

Truss is the logical endpoint of this process. Her mask has become her face. Her social self appears to have gone to war with her inner self and vanquished it in battle. All that is left now is the outer shell, a robot pursuing its mission long after its inventors have passed away. Perhaps the robot does not even know why it does these things. It is simply in its programming. 

People talk an awful lot of nonsense about failure nowadays. It's been absorbed into the dogma of wellness. The new consensus, especially from supposedly inspirational social media accounts, is that failure does not exist - it is simply the act of learning what it takes to succeed. This is obviously complacent bullshit from people who are doing well. Some failure is just that: failure. We weren't good enough, or smart enough, or athletic enough, or attractive enough, or - more frighteningly - our manner was wrong, we didn't quite socially fit in, people didn't want to work with us, and might never do. Sometimes we fail because we're shit at something, not because we're still learning how to do it.

But there is a grain of truth in that attitude towards failure. Sometimes it will genuinely be part of an improvement process towards finding the right approach. And sometimes - this is much harder to accept - it is a sign that we are bad at something and should try something else. It is a demonstration of our limitations, requiring us to hone the skills we have in another direction. For what it's worth, I had this with news journalism. I was simply terrible at it. I would fail to spot news when it was staring me in the face. My manner was all wrong. I cared too much. I was eager - not for a side, but for what I considered right and wrong - and lacked the detached attitude which is probably essential for decent news journalism, certainly in parliament. I found that once I committed to commentary, I could discover and incorporate news into that format much more effectively.  Failure was helpful, even if it had to be preempted by a considerable period of self-loathing and crushed confidence.

For us to develop any kind of positive result from failure we need humility. We need to have enough vulnerability in us to recognise it. And we require confidence too, to accept that we fucked up, or that we were bad at something, rather than just swinging around blaming others for what we ourselves were responsible for. Truss casts around desperately for someone to blame - the Office of Budget Responsibility, the Bank of England, the Treasury, the former permanent secretary, the civil service in general, the financial markets, the media. She will make the most absurd outlandish claims if it allows her to escape personal culpability. 

This demonstrates that her skin is not actually thick at all. It is too thin to allow a moment of genuine introspection. And for this reason, things will not improve for her.

There are good lessons here, if we choose to learn them, about how to conduct ourselves in our own lives. There's a lot to learn about the impossible balancing act of confidence and humility, inner certainty and self-doubt - these seemingly impossible combinations of attributes which we must somehow master if we are to advance in the world without becoming monstrous in the process. There are very good examples of how to fail and do it in a way that might lead to better outcomes in future.

Truss has provided us with an extremely compelling psychological lesson. We should thank her for that. And then, ideally, she should fuck off.