A new documentary explores the record-brief tenure of the prime minister who tried and failed to shrink the British government.
Most Americans may not know much about Liz Truss, the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. A new documentary aims to inform viewers about her brief tenure and the opposition she faced from the U.K. establishment every step of the way.
The Prime Minister vs. The Blob chronicles Truss’s 44 full days in office before she announced her resignation in October 2022. Released by Wall Street Journal Opinion and Palladium Pictures on Tuesday, the short documentary examines how Truss made costly political mistakes and how “the Blob” used those mistakes to its advantage.
The Blob refers to Great Britain’s equivalent of the deep state, or as President-elect Donald Trump calls it, “the Swamp.” As Truss describes it in the film, the Blob is a type of “groupthink” shared among politicians and executives that translates to “big spending, big government, big taxes, big immigration.” In other words, the system encompasses everything in its path.
“Liz Truss’s story is very revealing for the political moment we’re in now,” conservative documentary filmmaker Michael Pack told National Review. “Her story really does tell you a lot about dealing with the administrative state, and it’s a cautionary tale. It’s a lesson from what could happen to Donald Trump and what happened, in some sense, in his last term.”
Having led the U.S. Agency for Global Media during Trump’s final months in his first administration, Pack saw firsthand how the former president butted heads with the deep state in Washington, D.C. He was interested in understanding Truss’s similar struggles across the pond.
Truss’s tenure got off to a bumpy start. Two days after she started the job, Queen Elizabeth II died — an event that may have overshadowed Americans’ memory of British politics at the time.
The same day as the queen’s death, Truss fired Tom Scholar, permanent secretary to the Treasury, as part of her campaign against “Treasury orthodoxy.” Her decision made few friends in the political class.
From there, Truss’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, presented the Truss government’s ambitious mini-budget before the House of Commons that would boost economic growth through tax cuts. One of the proposals involved the abolition of the 45 percent income tax rate for wealthy earners.
The economic package sparked turmoil in the financial markets, with the pound falling to an all-time low against the dollar and interest rates skyrocketing.
Truss later reversed course on the 45 percent income tax cut after members of her own Conservative Party opposed it. The U-turn emboldened her critics, eventually leading to her downfall.
Her fights with the administrative state also stemmed from the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, both of which undermined her economic plan. Their efforts to sabotage Truss’s policies are explored at length in the documentary.
Amid the economic policy fallout, Truss was pressured to sack Kwarteng. He told her the Blob would come after her next. She already knew that.
The final blow to Truss’s prime ministership came during a disorganized vote in the House of Commons on a parliamentary motion to debate fracking, a deeply unpopular energy policy even among Tories. Truss lifted the Conservative Party’s 2019 ban on fracking, but the Labour opposition wanted to reinstate it.
Part of the Tory government’s messaging was that the fracking motion was a confidence vote, which would determine whether Truss had the support of her colleagues. Confusion ensued when a Tory MP announced the motion was not a confidence vote when, in reality, it was.
A Labour MP then claimed he saw Tory MPs being “physically manhandled” and “bullied” into backing Truss. The allegations proved to be false after an internal investigation found no evidence of manhandling or bullying. But the damage was already done.
Despite winning the vote on fracking, Truss lost the confidence of her own cabinet and party. Feeling like she couldn’t go on, Truss stepped down the following day. Rishi Sunak took her place five days later, making Truss’s full term 49 days.
While Truss has been compared to Trump given their shared goal to dismantle the administrative state, Pack feels she is different in many ways – and perhaps more palatable than Trump’s brash nature. Still, she was unable to radically change the system.
“Liz Truss’s story reveals that even with a different personality and a different kind of background, you can also encounter those same problems,” Pack said. “Liz is the anti–Donald Trump. They share a lot of policy positions, but she’s been in government a long time. She’s a woman, he’s a man. She’s not as controversial and explosive in personality as Donald Trump, and that didn’t make any difference.
“The Blob did not agree with her policies, voted her out, and forced her out. Now we are very clear in the film that she made a lot of political mistakes, but they were able to use those political mistakes against her. A Labour Party person would be given a lot more leeway.”
WSJ Opinion is collaborating with Palladium Pictures, Pack’s independent film company, on a series of short documentaries about stories that are misreported, underreported, or otherwise ignored by the media. (A previous entry covered the Crown Heights riots.) Pack thought Truss’s short stint as prime minister perfectly fit the criteria.
“Liz Truss’s story is, of course, huge news in the U.K.,” he said. “It’s just here in America that it’s been largely neglected, and no one has looked back. So it’s a neglected story only in the broader national and international context.”
Inspired by WSJ Opinion columnist Joseph Sternberg’s coverage of Truss, The Prime Minister vs. The Blob is available to watch on YouTube.
