This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
“Those who can’t, teach,” claims the old joke. “Those who can’t teach, teach P.E.” I’m not sure how fair this is. I propose a new version: “Those who can’t do politics become podcasters.”
In this column, I’ve sneered at the likes of Rory Stewart, George Osborne and Michael Gove. Now, failed politicians pivoting to podcasts might have plumbed its lowest depths with The Liz Truss Show.
I thought Truss was treated somewhat unfairly as prime minister. She didn’t seem to know what she was doing, for sure, but she was handed such a dreadful set of cards that she was effectively set up to fail.
Her attempt to latch onto the MAGA movement, though, has been shameless in its disingenuousness. A politician who once supported liberalising immigration rules — and who advocated against Brexit in 2016 — is now behaving as if she is some sort of hardline anti-establishment icon.
“Welcome to the home of the counter-revolution,” grins Truss as she introduces The Liz Truss Show. It’s a podcast, Mrs Truss — not the Smolny Institute.
It soon becomes clear that Truss has even less of a talent for interviewing than she had for politics.
She struggles to speak in coherent sentences. “It’s great to be joined by Matt Goodwin,” she says, “who is Britain’s number one Substack as well as being an academic who’s a specialist in these subjects.” Goodwin has Britain’s number one Substack. And what subjects does he specialise in?
Goodwin does his best to have a serious political conversation with Truss, but you might as well try to play chess with a squirrel. I’m not saying that Truss is unintelligent — she’s just too busy doing a bad impersonation of a right-wing populist to demonstrate her level of intelligence.
She throws out references to random PC outrages like a teenager throwing out references to alternative rock bands. Look how anti-woke I am! She can also be devastatingly un-self-aware. “The minute you put a word in front of ‘conservative’,” she says, referring to so-called “compassionate conservatives”, “you’re kind of dulling it.” Truss was a founder of the organisation Popular Conservatism.
Elsewhere, she speaks with the anti-democratic political theorist Curtis Yarvin. His idea is that democratic systems inevitably shift leftwards and that a right-wing leader must maximise executive power.
“The best private sector organisations, like SpaceX, JCB and The Liz Truss Show … have a clear structure and accountability,” says Truss. I think this was meant to be a humorous line, but Truss races through it so fast that it sounds mortifyingly sincere.
Yarvin has some interesting criticisms of democratic systems and populist movements. His big weakness is the handwaving that goes into his argument for a CEO-like monarch. Truss doesn’t seem to quite appreciate how radical Yarvin’s ideas are, but what makes the interview comical is that Yarvin is preaching the virtues of executive power to a woman who is a compelling argument against it.
I agree with many of Truss’s self-proclaimed criticisms of the British establishment: its lack of national allegiance, its commitment to mass migration, its devotion to harmful Blairite legal procedures et cetera.
But Truss is doing these criticisms an injustice by using them as a vehicle for self-promotion. She was not removed as PM because she was an existential threat to the Blob, but because she was perceived to be someone who had reckless budgetary ambitions. Her right-wing principles seem to be paper thin.
Beyond this, she isn’t good at podcasting. Yarvin makes a nice joke about Britain having a supreme court being like your little brother wearing your clothes. “They don’t fit,” Truss blurts out. To quote Rainier Wolfcastle: “That’s the joke.”
I am not pretending to be the most radical right-winger myself. Last month I even enjoyed a podcast from the Guardian. The Birth Keepers investigates a cult-like movement that has emerged advocating “free births” — births which take place unassisted and which are linked to appalling avoidable harms to children and mothers.
Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne are rightly empathetic when it comes to women who have been alienated from the medical system. (No one who knows anything about NHS maternity care should be unempathetic.) But failures of medical care are not an argument against medical care.
The Birth Keepers is damning on the pseudo-empowering mumbo jumbo of the free birth propagandists, which has had such a powerful effect on its victims that one woman initially sent an ambulance away when she was bleeding to death.
As a podcast, it is also an interesting critique of podcasts. “Con man” refers to people who gain people’s confidence, one mother says, but it could also refer to people selling confidence — people projecting an image of their own authoritativeness, as well as exploiting their victims’ fears and desires. This is all too common in podcasting, and The Birth Keepers effectively documents its grotesque effects on women. We must always be sceptical of podcasters who frame their audience as a movement, a following or, worst of all, a family.
No one will ever accuse The Liz Truss Show of having such cult-like qualities. Liz Truss just isn’t convincing enough to be a cult leader.
