Truss and Boris are now backing Trump… and ought to be ashamed of themselves

She believes in free trade, he believes in the Ukrainian cause – and Donald Trump firmly believes in neither. Yet both former prime ministers now say he should be president. What is the matter with them, asks John Rentoul

Former prime minister Liz Truss gives a speech at CPAC, Washington’s annual conservatives conference, where Trump will deliver the keynote this weekend (AP)

There is a case for refusing to take Liz Truss seriously. After all, she has started to use the phrase “the deep state” as if it means something, and as if that thing was responsible for her failure as prime minister.

She has started to contradict herself with the wilful abandon of someone who sees politics as entertainment. “I will fight, even if it’s not popular,” she told the CPAC conference in Washington, a jamboree of the American right that is in thrall to Donald Trump.

This is just weeks after launching a group in the UK called “Popular Conservatism”. Back in Washington, she attacked “Cinos” – Conservatives In Name Only – which she confusingly pronounced chinos, who apparently say: “I want to be popular, I don’t want to upset people, I don’t want to look like a mean person, I want my friends to like me.”

As Daniel Finkelstein, the Conservative peer, commented ironically, if her test of real conservatism is looking mean and not wanting our friends to like us, it is a “mystery how this came unstuck”.

But she did get to be prime minister, even if only for a period of record-breaking brevity. So we are obliged to take her a bit seriously. And we have to take Boris Johnson a bit seriously, too. He got to be prime minister, and he was even a player in the world-historical events of Brexit, coronavirus and war in Europe.

Indeed, Johnson’s early and steadfast support for the Ukrainian people’s independence was one of the decisions of the British government of which he can be proud. He took the threat of Putin seriously at a time when most people said that the Russian president could not be so detached from reality as to attempt to occupy and subjugate a nation of 44 million. The early supply of weapons to the Ukrainians may have been decisive in President Zelensky’s heroic resistance against the Russian advance.

So what is Johnson doing, telling The Sun: “When you look back at Trump’s last term in office, there is little doubt that the world felt safer and calmer and more stable”?

This is Donald Trump he is talking about. The Donald Trump who does not think Ukraine’s war is worth fighting, and does not see why the US should pay for any of it. Mainly because of his opposition to it, the Republican party in Congress is trying to block US funding for the Ukrainian war effort.

But Johnson says: “A lot of nice well-meaning people are quivering like smacked blancmanges at the idea of a new Trump presidency, I am not quite sure why they are so alarmed.” His love of a colourful phrase and his delight in shocking those of respectable opinions has once again got the better of his judgement.

He would rather make fun of people who are boring and predictable and right than stand up for the one principle that could have rescued his premiership from the entropy of history. He would rather protect his earnings on the US speakers’ circuit – the right-wing section of which has sold its soul to Trump – than tell American Republicans what they do not want to hear.

He has reduced himself to Truss’s level, shouting slogans as she stood next to Steve Bannon, Trump’s former equivalent of Dominic Cummings, in front of a whooping crowd of ideologues. “I wanted to cut taxes,” she told them. “The economic establishment in Britain wanted to keep things as they were. And they did. They got me.”

She blames communists, the establishment, the deep state and the friends of the deep state, including the Financial Times, for the failure of her government. In her actual speech to the CPAC, she read out one cursory line of self-criticism: “I’m not saying I’m a perfect person or that I did anything exactly right,” she said, “but…”

After that “but” came the long screed of victimhood in which it was everyone’s fault except her own that “they got me”. Especially those communists on the trading floors in the financial markets.

So she endorsed Trump, too: “We need a Republican back in the White House who is prepared to take on the leftist global establishment.” Thus launching into the biggest contradiction of all. She, a liberal free-trader, who fell out with Suella Braverman, her home secretary, who wanted to restrict immigration even if that suppressed economic growth. Truss was prime minister for only seven weeks, and still managed to split with her fellow right-winger.

Now she is endorsing Trump, a protectionist who wants to put up trade barriers around the US market, at a conference awash with banners opposed to “globalisation”. It doesn’t make sense, but then so little that either she or Boris Johnson say makes sense as they hitch their wagons to the Trump gravy train.

We have to take them seriously because they understood politics well enough to make it to No 10. But in that case, we have to condemn them all the more forcefully for their hypocrisy in selling out what last shreds of principle they had left.