Liz Truss: The Blob is infiltrating Reform

0:04The Telegraph.

0:09We're joined by Liz Truss to talk about Keir Starmer kowtowing to the Chinese, the evil deep state, and why she admires Donald Trump. And I'm going to admit that I far preferred Liz Truss's mini-budget to Rachel Reeve's last two budgets. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Rachel Johnson.

0:39Rachel Johnson, we were together last night at an awards ceremony for political podcasts that both of us lost. I know, but we are winning here because we're being joined by former Prime Minister and former Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. Liz Truss, welcome to The Daily Tea. Thank you for being here. Very good to be here. Would you like some tea? Well, I've got some coffee, thank you very much. Some coffee, you can make do with that. But because it's you, because it's you, and you're such a special guest, we've got some pastries. And would you like one? We bought you, we selected a Marmite twist for reasons you may understand.

1:14Let's go on, look at it. No, I'm not having one of those, sorry. What's the one in the middle? That's the one I want, it's the cheese and ham Danish. That looks better. All right, we'll have to fight over that later. We'll fight over that. Do you like Marmite? I don't really, I don't have strong feelings about Marmite. That's a very political answer. No, but it's true. Right, OK. Like I would eat, if I was hungry, I might eat that pastry. Right. But say what? It's like a chocolate. You know, it's like a non-thing. Would you say you're Marmite? Uh, maybe. Maybe, yeah. What do you think about Chinese food?

1:50I love Chinese food. Ah, well then, would you have gone to China, as Keir Starmer did, to visit Xi? No, I wouldn't. But I did go to China quite a lot as a government minister. And I did have some very good food there. Right. OK, we're not going to talk too much about China because it's been a bit of a washout. The prime minister has visited China. The visit was built up a great deal. He has made a lot of emphasis upon the fact that it's the first visit in eight years by a prime minister to the country. And Xi talked about the twists and turns of the relationship, which felt like a bit of a knock at the Tories.

2:26He's very happy to see the Labour prime minister visiting. I'm sure he is. I'm sure he is because Kier Starmer is a fully signed up member of the international globalist pro-China elite. Of course he is. Pleased to see him. So Kier Starmer would say he's got out of this British Tories being able to visit China for 30 days without a visa, plus China agreeing to help to tackle the trade in engine parts that people use in small boats to cross the Channel. Is this enough? And do you think other compromises were made by the UK? Of course other compromises were made. And we saw the mega embassy be approved, which essentially allows the Chinese to spy on the city of London.

3:08We know they've already been spying on Downing Street. We know that they've been spying in Parliament. These people are not our friends. And yet Keir Starmer has gone over with a begging bowl because he is desperate, Because the British economy is in a desperate state, because he doesn't really have an economic philosophy, his only alternative is to go begging to the Chinese. But this stuff is very thin gruel. I mean, the problem with illegal migration isn't what the boats are made of. It's the fact that when people arrive illegally, we don't deport them and there's no disincentive. It's like saying the problem with knife crime is steel.

3:49the knives are created with. It's like an utterly bizarre thing. And every time anybody does a deal with China, and this is true about things like the climate change deals that were done, or trade deals that were done, China reneges on them. They can't be trusted. I mean, I had experience when I was DEFRA secretary, we had huge shipments of British products outside China. They weren't allowed in. There were all kinds of spurious reasons came up. It was inevitably a political issue. And that's how the Chinese play in trade. So they can't be trusted. They aren't on our side. They have plans to increase their dominance into Europe and places like Canada.

4:33If you look at what Mark Carney's been doing, he's been following the same playbook as Keir Starmer. It's a disaster. It's an absolute disaster. It won't solve Britain's economic problems, by the way. And Liz, you've been foreign secretary, as well as prime minister, you say you wouldn't have gone to China as PM. But let's say you were there as foreign secretary, not giving a kind of the imprimatur of the Chinese regime in the same way that Keir is now in this kind of brief blow by kowtow he's doing. But I don't think he's even raised Taiwan, from what we're hearing. And I heard last night that China has made it very obvious that it will incorporate Taiwan with it by about 2029.

5:17It's making absolutely no secret of that. So, I mean, do you think that this is a sin of omission on the part of our British Prime Minister? To be brutally honest, the Chinese don't care what Britain thinks anyway. Even if Keir Starmer raised these issues, it would be water off a duck's back. Would it be an insult to them? President Xi, the only power he is concerned about is the United States of America. And the reason he's concerned about them is that Trump is unpredictable. He doesn't know what Trump will do, which is one of the reasons I think is Trump is exactly what's needed in the geopolitics we face today.

5:55But Britain is a declining power. Our economy has been stagnant for the last 30 years. Our military is in a pretty terrible state. I don't think President Xi is going to be quaking in his boots about what Keir Starmer says to him. The way to take on China has to be to work with our allies like the United States. The fact is Britain is not strong enough to take a stance alone. We're not strong enough to take a stance on trade alone. I think we should work to become stronger as a country. I think that starts with dealing with our economic stagnation. But why on earth is this a priority? The country, the NHS is in serious trouble.

6:39The military is in serious trouble. The government is falling apart. Why is Keir Starmer on another plane to another faraway land that's going to make no impact apart from giving the Chinese a bit more ability to spy on us? Yeah, which we now know the Chinese did from 2021 to 2024, including spying on AIDS to you. This espionage is so endemic. Is it something that Britain should just shrug and say, well, we do it to them. They do it to us. We can't pay attention to it. We've just got to carry on trying to build some kind of relationship. Of course we shouldn't. I do believe, by the way, we should trade with China.

7:19I just don't believe we should have close links with them and we shouldn't be sharing technology or sharing intelligence or asking them to help with the small boats crisis. That's completely wrong for people who are strategically on the opposite side of the great global divide. That's completely wrong. This spying issue, I fear that much of British officialdom is beholden to China. That's what's happened, particularly the Treasury. When I was in the Trade Department, when I was in the Foreign Office, the Treasury was constantly pushing for closer relationships with China. It was pushing a trade deal.

8:01It was pushing a jet co. The only way I could deal with that, because by then I was a China hawk. I started off not as a China hawk, but after several visits to China and seeing President Xi declare himself like president, the scales fell from my eyes. I became a China hawk. But I could just feel the pressure that was coming from the City of London, that was coming from the Treasury to do more with China. That's very interesting because to talk about a change in your mind there, I get this sense, because I want to talk about the administrative state and why it's broken and how to fix it. I get this sense that your experience of being prime minister perhaps changed you.

8:40Did it alter your analysis of why Britain is broken and how it can be fixed? It didn't. And thank you very much for coming on the Liz Truss Show, Tim. It was a pleasure. I enjoyed it. To talk about the British state. And I hope all the watchers of the Telegraph podcast will also watch the Liz Trot show. I hope they will do. Available on Rumble and YouTube. Because that's obligatory. It's a great podcast. I really enjoy watching it. Particularly the episode you appear on. And of course, Rachel, you're very welcome. As long as you do mine, Liz, I'd be delighted. But did that experience of trying to govern the country a certain way and realising you couldn't, did that change your philosophy of government?

9:18It radicalised it. Right. I was already of the view that the British state didn't work. And being a minister for 10 years, starting as a junior minister in education, I was constantly battling officialdom and also other people in the Conservative Party. And often it was difficult to distinguish between officialdom and other people in the Conservative Party to do the right thing. So I had huge fights over education policy, huge fights over the trade deals that I wanted to do, huge fights over environment policy. But I still believed that the system could be reformed with a few tweaks and that the people more senior in a hierarchy than me were simply too weak or too wet to do what was needed.

10:14But when I got to the top, I realised the sheer force of the administrative state and the relatively powerless position the prime minister is in now in modern Britain. Right. So that did radicalise me, yes. So if you as a reforming prime minister said you wanted to do something, what were the forces that prevented you from doing it? So let's take the example of what actually happened, which is I put together a budget, which I believed would reduce the deficit, increase the country's growth, put Britain on a better path. The counterfactual has been shown to have failed. You know, the debt is worse.

11:05Growth levels are worse. Unemployment's higher. Even indicators like gilts are worse. than they were in 2022. But what happened is when I put that forward, the Bank of England, which are unelected, the night before the mini budget, unbeknownst to me, announced the sale of£40 billion worth of government gilts. And then in the days afterwards, their failure to regulate the pensions industry led to a market crisis. They blamed me for it. And what I saw was the entire system backed them rather than me. And when I say system, I'm not just talking about the Treasury and the Office of Budget Responsibility, which is part of it.

11:49I'm talking about the senior voices in the media. I'm talking about the establishment overall. So what I saw was so-called independent parts of government taking decisions that affect people's lives and being utterly unaccountable for them. And in 2024, the Bank of England released a report about 2022 saying that two thirds of the changes in the market were down to the failure to regulate the pensions industry. And yet there's been very little coverage. Those people haven't been held to account for what they did. Andrew Bailey, who's failed on everything from inflation to quantitative easing, there's virtually no coverage.

12:37So that was a radicalising experience. But let me give you another example, which is not specifically about me. Lots of people say, we need to turn around the boats and the channel to stop illegal immigration. As a government minister, if you ordered, even as prime minister, if you ordered the Navy to do that, they would just say, we're not doing that because it's illegal. So the civil service now decides what's legal and what's not legal and can essentially refuse to do what government ministers say under the system that was set up by Tony Blair. So from everything from the Chagos Islands to migration to fiscal policy to monetary policy, you have a so-called independent arbiter deciding what's legal, what's true, what the forecasts are.

13:34You're completely boxed in. I think Boris tried to ask the Navy and he was told that that was, as you say, it was a contravened international maritime regulations and it was unsafe and all the rest of it. He tried to do that as well. In terms of your institutional reforms, though, you've explained the problem you had and how you were sort of booby-trapped before you'd even delivered your budget by the sale of gilts by the Bank of England. Are they under any obligation to warn you they were doing this on the eve of your budget, for example? Do you think there was anything deliberate in what they did?

14:19I think it was at best arrogant. And they're just like, we're independent. This is what we're doing. We decide monetary policy. We don't need to inform other people. And at worst, it was malignant. But they certainly did not inform me. They didn't inform the Treasury. And they didn't inform me either that there was massive tinderbox waiting, which was the LDI crisis, which sort of blew up the markets. They have taken because when Brown made them independent, it was operational independence. They were meant to be focused on delivering the inflation target. And they had operational independence to achieve that.

15:08Now it's become a shibboleth of you can't even question what they're doing. And during the leadership election, I questioned what they were doing. I said, Andrew Bailey has failed. He's printed huge amounts of money. Quantitative easing has been a disaster. It's shafted the younger generation in Britain. They can't get on the housing ladder because of the inflation and asset prices. This is a failed system. And he wasn't on my side. But I guess what your critics might say is that accepting there was, say, an error when it came to the pensions market, some of what you're describing as a conspiracy or arrogance are actually guardrails against bad policy.

15:48That the real issue is the budget was just wrong. And those various people who came out and said the budget is wrong and those Tory MPs who agitated to try to reverse it, they were just trying to correct an error that was yours. But this thing about guardrails, like guardrails are the opposite of democracy. If you're going to say somebody has a mandate and then you're going to guard against what they do, well, who's deciding that? And that's basically the problem we've now got in Britain. We've got an unelected technocracy of lawyers, of judges, of Keynesian economists deciding what's acceptable and what's not acceptable and setting guardrails.

16:32I mean, and I would point to the counterfactual of what's actually happened. When we didn't do the mini-budget, things have got even worse. Yeah. But again, to push back on that, some would say, but Liz, you were not elected by the public. You were elected by the Tory membership, but you were not elected by the public. You had a great misfortune, which was the Queen died. It wasn't just a misfortune for you, it was a misfortune for her and the entire nation. But it meant that you didn't have time to explain to people what it is you were going to do and why. But this is all just cope, Tim. this is all just complete cope.

17:01It is. You know your lingo. You know your youthful lingo. It is total cope. I don't know what cope is. You don't know what cope is. It is just cope. Because people can't deal with the fact that we have a system that isn't working and we need massive change. And they just think, if only we had a better prime minister, if only we had, you know, different people in each party, everything would be better. That's being tested to destruction. Every single prime minister is proving to be less popular than the previous prime minister. We've got a system problem is what I'm saying. And when people critique the mini budget, they don't actually critique the policies, which were things like not raising corporation tax.

17:47I wanted to keep corporation tax at 19%, not raise it to 25%. I wanted to allow duty free shopping in London. I wanted to get rid of IR35 and help the self-employed. I wanted to start fracking to lower energy prices. Nobody ever goes into what the policies were. Can I just say, speaking as somebody who's self-employed, I much far preferred Liz Truss's budget to the last two budgets that have been presented by Rachel Reeves. They have done more to damage the British economy than anything Liz Truss ever did. But the mini-budget did contain also a massive bung. £25 billion of unfunded tax cuts, yes.

18:28And not just that, but the bailout on energy as well. We'll talk about energy in a minute, but let's just talk about the concept of unfunded tax cuts. That is a left-wing phrase. It sort of forgets the existence of the Laffer curve. We're celebrating 50 years of the Laffer curve, and the whole concept is if you put taxes up too much, you damage growth and end up getting less revenue and everybody leaves the country and what's happened since we've got the highest rate of millionaires leaving britain of any country in the world the laffer curve is real unfunded tax cuts are just a left-wing attack line but the problem is the whole of the economic establishment whether it's university economic departments the Bank of England, the Treasury, has been captured by left-wing Keynesian thinking.

19:21That's the issue. But you're saying the markets have been too, and they're not. I mean, the markets just want to make money. But you're saying that they've been captured by people saying, you know, arguing that you can't make unfunded tax cuts without balancing them off with welfare, cuts in welfare spending. I don't believe that's how the market thinks or the market acts. The market responds to what organisations like the Bank of England do. they're very powerful with the major banks. Don't underestimate the power of these institutions that have been handed massive authority by successive governments, just like the judiciary have.

19:57I mean, it's not only the central bank that's a problem in this country or the treasury, although I do believe they are the most powerful part of government. We've also handed huge powers to the judiciary. We've handed huge powers to unelected police chiefs. Now, there is a, we have a system problem in Britain. And that is, I saw it myself, I saw it from the top. The policies I was pursuing were the right policies for Britain. The question people should be asking is, why was it stopped? And who stopped it? Do you think you've been turned into a bogeyman by not just the left, but also the Tories?

20:36They invoke the mini budget whenever they want to say, this is why you can't do this, or you can't do that. But, I mean, there are some people... I'm telling you, you have been turned into a bogey man. There are some people in the Conservative Party who are not Conservatives, and we know who those are. Would you include Prosper UK in that? That's the... You know, they seem a bit Liberal Democratic to me. Right. There are people in the Conservative Party who don't believe in the Laffer curve. And one thing that was very interesting on Prosper UK's little manifesto thing was that they said, we believe in the British institutions.

21:12And I am an institution sceptic. I believe our institutions have been captured and we will not fix Britain's problems without making those institutions accountable again. And there's a whole strand of people in the Conservative Party who desperately love institutions, who go on about the OBR, who go on about the Bank of England. And the BBC. The BBC and the operational police independence, that was a favourite of Theresa May, or international law, all those people like Dominic Grieve. These people are the problem. Yeah. That is the problem. That is what is stopping Britain prospering, are these globalist ideologues who love these institutions and are comfortable with the fact that they have become a vehicle for the progressive left, which is what they've become.

22:11They all believe in net zero. They all believe in transgender ideology. They all believe in Keynesian economics. That's the problem. So as far as I'm concerned, those people are not on my side. They're on the other side of the argument. They're not Democrats. They believe in an unelected technocracy, making decisions that are best for the people. And in that, they are the heirs to Blair. And this is why I had an episode on my podcast about the House of Blair, because that's where a lot of these problems got a lot worse. And the fundamental failing of the Conservative Party over 14 years was not reversing Blairism.

22:53Coming up next, we're going to ask Liz Truss whether she wants to go across to reform and whether reform might have her.

23:12So for those listening to this who agree with you, who want to change things and shake them up, who do they vote for at the next election? Should they vote Conservative, which contain many of the people who have committed these errors you've described? Or should they vote Reform, which seems to share your systems-based analysis of what's going wrong? Well, I think more than that, they have to get up off their sofa and actually start participating. Right. But in whom? Well, I think they should join X. They should start talking. They should subscribe to my... You can sit on your sofa and do that.

23:45Well, I suppose they could. I want to know who they should run for office for, who they should leaflet for. But this is back to the issue, which is journalists focus on the political layer at the expense of everything else. what I want to know is who's actually going to be running the Bank of England in the future that we can trust who's going to be running the foreign office how should Downing Street be restructured so it's actually a functional center of government where the prime minister can get things done those are the important points and I don't feel these issues get aired at all in Britain and until there's a movement that is putting forward these ideas and if you look to America or you saw the Tea Party and the MAGA movement came prior to Trump, that's the sort of movement we need in Britain.

24:33We need a public revolt against these institutions that have failed us. And I think it's starting with people are really now sceptical of the police. If you look at the West Midlands police fabricating evidence, this is what is going on. It's deeply rotten. Do you personally trust the police? I trust some police officers, but I think as an institution, elements of the police have got it completely wrong. Can you say something about this week, the BBC, which had a script that was repeated ad nauseam by very highly rated and visible presenters that describe the Holocaust as when the Nazis killed 6 million people?

25:12Liz, I mean, what do you think that tells us about lefty progressive capture of our state broadcaster? I mean, it's appalling and it has to be defunded. You know, I think it is hugely damaging to our country. I'm a huge BBC sceptic. But again, what we have in Britain is a very powerful establishment that has been captured by the left and doesn't want to change. And we've got a very angry populace that wants change. A lot of people. And a lot of the battles, I mean, going, not that I just want to talk about myself, but going back to 20... That sounded like reform, what you said there, which we might be getting on to.

25:50Going back to 2022. You know, people use it as a baking mat because these people are the establishment. You know, they want to use me as a kind of core celebra to stop the change that is needed in our country. And that's why people who back change need to actually talk about what happened in 2022 and be exposing the institutions who caused the problem. You've talked very, I think, very well about the problem. You're becoming my favourite Johnson. The problem we have, so much of what is talked about and so much of politics focuses on the wrong thing. The top layer of HR, basically, the politicians rather than the policies, the people who are running the institutions, not the establishment institutions that you've decried, but, you know, the citadels of power inside politics.

26:52And you said how silly it was for Starmer to have got on a plane post the Andy Burnham sort of mini-crisis, let's call it. But if there was another change of personnel at the top, and you've become emblematic of the churn in our prime ministers, if the Labour Party started emulating Tory churn in its own leaders, We would get somebody who was to the left of Keir Starmer. So we would see three and a half years of the problems you've described only getting worse in your view, i.e. more left wing, more welfarist, more statist, more Keynesian. So, I mean, are you in favour of another change of prime minister or do you think, would you like to see Keir set fair until the next general election?

27:46I think that the British state is already on a trajectory of driving itself off a cliff because the institutional policies that are in place on migration, on economics, on public services are baked in. And I think if there was a more left wing Labour leader, they wouldn't be able to change things very much. They wouldn't be able to spend much more on welfare because they'd fall foul of the Office of Budget Responsibility. They wouldn't actually be able to do anything different. And if you watch the internal debate in the Labour Party, nobody's actually saying what policies they would do that are different from Keir Starmer.

28:29But they could tax us a lot more. No, well, I don't believe they actually could. The markets wouldn't mind that. You don't think they could? I think we are reaching the limit of even what the likes of the OBR thinks are the maximum levels of taxation. Right. Interesting. And look at what's happened on non-DOMs where Reeves has had to row back a bit. Look at what's happening on business rates. You know, you talked about guardrails. The unelected state has quite narrow guardrails that they're allowing politicians to play in, essentially. And that's what every budget, the OBR presents, here's your pocket money to spend Rachel Reeves and it's like oh 20 billion one way or the other what do we do with that how do we raise the extra money that's how it is I agree with that I don't believe that really I mean I don't actually believe that Starmer and Reeves policies are significantly different from Rishi Sunak's yeah all that is happening is she is reaping the rewards or the calamities of what soon acted raising corporation tax, changing the non-DOM regime, et cetera, et cetera.

29:43I mean, they've made it a bit worse. They've increased public sector pay a lot, which has made the public sector even less productive than it already was. But the trajectory isn't fundamentally different under this government. Yeah. I think when the left crows about what happened to your administration, they're making a mistake because it could happen to them too, because there's only so much that the establishment will tolerate a government trying to do. But as you have suggested, they have used your time in office. The establishment uses it as an example. This is why you must not attempt to do anything radical.

30:13I'd agree with that. But, of course, it's not just the left or even the centre-right that does that. One reform member has done that too. He's a new member, Rob Jenrick, who has said that... He's also a member of the Rishi Sunak campaign team. Right. So I don't think we can claim this man as an unbiased witness of history. He said after joining reform that he would have, quote, chucked Liz Truss out of the party because your mini budget was careless and cack-handed and caused real harm to people. And he told Sky News that one reason why he left the Conservatives was because they hadn't kicked you out.

30:46He said the arsonists are still there. I mean, like, that's just completely implausible. And Rob Jenrick is not a stupid person. And he knows perfectly well about what the Bank of England does. and he was part of the Rishi Sunak team that essentially wanted to oust me. I mean, ever since I became prime minister, which shocked them because they deliberately connived to get rid of Boris. You know, it was an orchestrated campaign to get rid of Boris and install Sunak. And the minute I became prime minister, they were stirring the pot as much as they could. And of course, Jenrick was part of that team.

31:25So even the reform's latest recruit is part of the blob. I'm sure the blob is trying to infiltrate reform. I've got no doubt about that. You've described him as a Trojan horse for defecting to reform and you've suggested that someone would be giving him orders. Who would be giving Rob Jenrick orders and what would they be? Well, what I'm suggesting is that Nigel Farage is now the bookie's favourite to be next prime minister. If you're a member of the British establishment, if you're somebody who has connived to keep Britain on this managed decline trajectory, what are you going to try and do? You're going to try and get into reform.

32:04That seems the logical thing. So what I'm suggesting, given Robert is not stupid and is a perfectly intelligent person, he knows what happened in 2022. He knows that the Bank of England was responsible. I'm sure he's read the report that they put out in 2024. So all I can assume is he must have an ulterior motive. And ulterior motives are not something that are foreign to politics. But what I would point out is when I was deposed from office, that is when a lot of Conservative members joined reform because they could see what happened. They could see that I was deliberately sabotaged not just by the Bank of England, but also by the cabal in the Conservative Party, the cabal behind net zero, behind mass migration, behind higher taxes.

32:59They could see that. And that is when they left the party. And Nigel Farage praised your budget. Nigel Farage praised your budget. As the Daily Mail did. He did indeed. Finally a real Tory budget. He did indeed. And many people who left the Conservative Party and are now members of reform supported what I tried to do. If you had remained as leader of the party, do you think the reform Tory split would be happening today? If you had seen the party through that general election? No, I don't. You would have reunited the right. I think it was the last chance. It was the last chance to... To prevent the split?

33:36To prevent the split. Right. And to actually put the Conservatives on the right path. because we essentially had a choice. And this divide was evident, you know, definitely from Brexit and Theresa May's time in office. There was a bunch of people who wanted to stay with the establishment, who backed the institutions, who backed international law, who wanted to remain close to the EU. Some of them even wanted to reverse the referendum. And there was a bunch of people who said, no, when British people voted to leave in 2016, that was a massive wake up call of we are frustrated with the entire way Britain is governed.

34:17We want it to be different. And that split was being constantly fought within the Conservative Party on everything from trade to China to regulations to, So if you remember, one of the things we wanted to do and Jacob Rees-Mogg was in charge of getting all the EU law off our statute books, which was then actually stopped by Sunak and his then business secretary, Kemi Beignock. So all of those battles were raging for that whole time. And I was the last gasp, frankly, of that. Let's change the way Britain works. Right. So if you were the last gasp and if we lost that battle. Sunak's winning was the establishment taking back control.

35:04Right. And the British public rewarded them with the worst result since 1834. So logically, if you were the last gasp, then the Tories now cannot be saved. It's over. I don't think it's ever over. And we're a long way away from the next election. The next election's in 2029, I believe, because Keir Starmer, By the way, I think he'll hold on as leader of the Labour Party because he's got a roofless streak and he seems to manage to keep control of the party. There's a long way to go before 2029. And this is my point about... 2029, you think it is? Yes. So can I ask... All I'm saying is, you know, the blob will try and do what they can to infiltrate both parties.

35:53That's what's going on. What's your take on reform's package as it stands now, from its quite high spend economic offering to its quite nationalist kind of cultural offering to saying things like, we don't necessarily believe that people who were born in Britain are British and its deportations strategy, which kind of has a kind of whiff of ice going on, as does what you were saying. you know, Trud of MAGA. There's a lot of MAGA in there. What you were saying, the way you're talking about the Bank of England reminded me of how Trump talks about J-Pole. And, you know, he can't bear the fact that he's being hemmed in at all by any institutions at all.

36:37So just get focusing it down back to Liz Truss and reform. I mean, I'm not sure if you're a big C conservative or a little C conservative at the moment. If reform flashed an ankle to you, I know they've said at one point they wouldn't have you or Sue Ella. But Suella went over. Was it this week? Yeah, it's been so far. Yeah, it's been so much going on. Suella's gone. Are you the next big beast to join the Reform Party, Liz? Well, I have escaped the cesspit of party politics. I'm not desperate to dive in any, you know, my podcast is party neutral. I have people of all parties appearing on it. And I think there's a lot more to do to expose why Britain is broken and how the country has failed and what needs to happen.

37:27And as I say, I think there's a lot of mileage before 2029. But yes, I am a full blown Trump supporter. I think that is the style of government and policy you need to take these people on. Are you still a member of the Conservative Party? I am. And has Nigel Farage asked you to join Reform? No, he hasn't. And have you asked Nigel Farage if you could join Reform? No, I haven't. You did have lunch with him, I believe, recently. And it's reported that you were irritated about Rob Jenner. I have lunch with all kinds of people, Tim. Right, OK. I even have lunch with journalists sometimes. Did you raise frustrations about what Rob Jenner had said?

38:04Did you have any words about that? I was talking about fracking. You were there to just talk about fracking over lunch. My goodness. What a lunch that must have been. Do you think that, I mean, do you see that... The tracking would be transformative, by the way. I mean, would reform then not be contaminated by the accession of so many deadbeat Tories or Tories who were served in Boris Johnson's government? I mean, who was it who said, you know, reform can't turn into old wine in new bottles? If it does, what would be the great USP as against the Conservative Party? To me, the crucial issue in Britain, and why I'm a Trumpian-style patriot, although I'm not an American patriot, I'm a British patriot, is the fact that we have failed institutions in this country and they need to be revolutionized, which is why when you ask me about economic policy or even migration policy and how it's done, to me the key question is who is prepared to take on these institutions?

39:12Who is prepared to dismantle the BBC? Who is prepared to make the Bank of England accountable again? Who is prepared to get rid of the Supreme Court and actually have a proper Lord Chancellor in this country? That's what I'm interested in. And what I don't see yet is anybody really prepared to do that. It strikes me, Liz, that... I mean, I would love Donald Trump to come over and run in 2029. But he's not going to do that, and I think you should go off and be in a... We can't rule that out, can we, Rachel? You should go to America. Well, he wants to be world king. I mean, imagine the childhood wound that was reopened when he actually became world king, a sort of blonde, bombastic politician.

39:53But it sounds to me like you want to take America rather than you want to remake England. And also I've heard, by the way, that you were spotted playing golf at Glen Eagles, which strikes me that you want to go off to the links or the fairways of Mar-a-Lago and play a few holes. Well, I might be playing golf in Florida very soon, but I'm not going to. What is your handicap? Best not commented on. When did you take up golf? A lady never reveals her age or her handicap. I think that's the... Really? When did you take up golf? About a year ago. About a year ago. Have you played with the president?

40:32No, I haven't. You haven't? Okay. He cheats, but he moves the ball. you must yeah you say that we can learn from him of course some some people might be embarrassed you've written some very good columns about it i know and then you've written some very bad columns i i judge it by the reaction to the first that's better than the average journalist but i mean okay trump definitely is someone who is willing to challenge the powers that be and deconstruct and start again but in the case of ice deportations it's led to a loss of life a lot people are embarrassed by that. And I'm sure many British conservatives will be looking at and saying, we don't want to do that in this country.

41:10How do you feel about it? What he is facing is an armed insurrection. That's what's happening. But that's because of the Second Amendment and the craziness of that part of the Constitution. Well, lots of criminals in Britain have guns, even though we don't have the Second Amendment. I mean, you don't have ICU nurses. with packing heat. The lady who was shot driving her car was not armed. The gentleman who was shot while protesting the nursing was armed as he is constitutionally able to be armed and the gun was taken away from him and then he was shot. So he was a disarmed insurrection. What you do have is an armed insurrection.

41:47Right. And that is a very difficult thing to deal with. Who are you talking about here? You're talking about the protesters trying to stop the ICE deportations. I'm talking about left-wing protesters coordinating on Signal. And in the case of some of these states, a lack of cooperation from the state governor with legitimate law enforcement. It's a very serious situation in America. I don't want it to get anything like that in Britain. I mean, Liz has a point, surely. Alex Pretti was an ICU you nurse, he wouldn't have been taking his gun into the hospital where he worked. He was taking his gun.

42:29I think what ICE has done is awful. It's the contradiction. Conservatives will say... Why did he take a gun to the streets, to that part of Minneapolis, where there was a demonstration against ICE? One minute American conservatives will tell you it's your constitutional right to do that. The next minute when they decide he is part of an armed insurrection, they'll shoot him dead. I accept that. That's the contradiction. And this is we don't you see, I think emotionally and psychologically, many small C conservatives don't like Trump because they don't like they wince. This is my point. This is my point.

43:04This is why conservatives in Britain are losing because they wince. They try and go halfway. They try and compromise with these people. And what we have is people who are open border, pro-China, verging on communists running our country. And you can't compromise with these people. And that is my point. British conservatives, in whatever form they take, they need to be prepared to not be popular with the liberal establishment. and that's a very few people at present. Trump allowed the new mayor of New York to call him a fascist. Would you call Trump a fascist, Liz Truss? No, I wouldn't. Okay. Well, Liz Truss, thank you very much for coming and it's been a pleasure to speak to you.

43:57Thank you.

44:12Thank you.