Liz Truss is running for office but also wants to hide

Our likely next prime minister is running scared of Nick Robinson and Andrew Neil, says Sean O’Grady

Liz Truss wants to avoid TV interviews in which she might be exposed (PA)

Liz Truss claims to be “ready” to unleash nuclear weapons against an unspecified enemy and thus risk the annihilation of all life in the British Isles, which is perhaps not what we would like her to “deliver”.

A steady, tungsten-carbide-tipped nerve is required in such a scenario and yet Ms Truss is running scared of Nick Robinson and Andrew Neil. She just doesn’t wish to be interviewed by them. It isn’t difficult to see why.

What, for example, would she be able to say about the cost of living crisis? Energy bills? War in Ukraine? The Northern Ireland protocol? The casual insults lobbed at friend and foe alike? The concern is that, despite a decade in cabinet and weeks of opportunity for her and her team to formulate policy, she has said little about what she would actually do in office.

She has no manifesto – actual or metaphorical – and so far her economic approach of cutting taxes first and asking questions later has been widely derided. Some of the ideas posited by her camp are simply bizarre; halving VAT to 10 per cent, for example, wouldn’t do much for poorer families struggling with the cost of food, which is zero-rated for VAT. It would also punch a huge hole through public finances and stoke inflation just as the Bank of England is attempting to get it under control. Ms Truss dresses like Margaret Thatcher but acts much more like Ted Heath, the last premier to unleash a desperate and doomed dash for growth.

On a more generous reading of the situation, perhaps Ms Truss wishes to consult the current chancellor, Treasury officials and her likely future chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, before she commits herself to anything and fears a loose word under pressure might set the wrong kind of hares running.

On balance, it looks very much as if she is running scared of any kind of close contact with a challenging interlocutor. In this respect, she has been far less open, and far less impressive, than Rishi Sunak, who is happy to explain his policies, and he has more than held his own in most of his appearances. Geeky as he is, he at least gives the impression of knowing what he is talking about. Ms Truss, by contrast, seems much less at home with economics, and far more inclined to rely on the dubious claim that tax cuts will pay for themselves through an upsurge in entrepreneurial activity, and that the British economy need only seize those elusive “Brexit opportunities” to become the economic powerhouse of Europe. Rather, as Michael Gove put it, her policies really amount to a holiday from reality.

If Ms Truss were merely cautious, why did she agree to the BBC interview in the first place? And, before that, why did she say she’d try to find the time to go on Channel 4 with Andrew Neil only to discover her diary was suddenly too full for six whole weeks?

It does look as though Ms Truss is following the Boris Johnson playbook and minimising media scrutiny. She doesn’t have to grant anyone an interview, so she doesn’t. This, though, is in stark contrast to some of her more intellectually confident predecessors. For all their fear and loathing of journalists, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair would all subject themselves to the cruel eye of the television camera and probing by the likes of Robin Day, Jonathan and David Dimbleby, Brian Walden and John Humphrys, because these leaders had a point to make and an argument to win. More often than not, by being equally guileful and inevitably better informed on the issues, they survived and even enjoyed the cut and thrust of the argument. Truss prefers to swerve such awkwardness.

So it does not inspire much confidence that Truss is even more camera-shy than Mr Johnson when asked to justify her policies, and some of her past performances, readily available on YouTube, show her to be an unusually poor performer, easily flummoxed and prone to robotic repetition of campaign slogans. She hasn’t yet retreated into an industrial refrigerator to avoid questions, as Johnson once did on breakfast television, but it’s not something she’d rule out.

Truss just doesn’t “engage” with conventional media outlets and journalists who wish to hold her to account. She prefers more obliging environments such as GB News where, she absurdly remarked, they get their facts right, unlike the BBC. When Mr Johnson dissembled, as he was forced to do so often, he did his best to employ a little wit and self-deprecating humour to chivvy his interviewer on to the next topic, techniques thus far beyond Truss: never mind a new economic policy, she can’t even deliver a punchline. To adapt the old saying, she’s running and she sees no reason why she can’t also hide.