Senior Tories want former prime minister Liz Truss to “take a holiday” and get out of the public gaze for “at least a year.”
The comments came after Ms Truss became a popular feature for Trump’s Maga supporters and donors on the inauguration party circuit in Washington DC last week.
On Monday night just hours after Donald Trump was sworn in, the former prime minister, who last just 49 days in Downing Street, stood up at one of the official balls celebrating the inauguration and gave an impromptu speech.
Ms Truss is said to have repeated the line that Britain needs its own Trump and praised the incoming US president for “saving western civilisation”.
A source from the ball packed full of rightwing backers of the new administration said that “she got a huge ovation for her words”.
But the interventions are causing alarm in the Conservative Party with a number concerned that she is “becoming an embarrassment.” On Thursday, The Guardian reported that that current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch suggested at a shadow cabinet meeting she “wants Liz Truss to shut up for a while”.
Two Conservatives visiting DC for the Trump inauguration this week told The Independent: “She needs to take a holiday”, with one suggesting that it should be “for at least a year.”
The scars left by the former prime minister’s disastrous mini-Budget and memories of The Daily Star’s lettuce campaign still linger.
Ms Truss is not commenting on the suggestions she should disappear from the public gaze for a while although an ally suggested that the comments would likely have the opposite effect.
When The Independent caught up with Ms Truss at an inauguration event she said she had “no intention of joining Reform” and would be staying with the Tories arguing “party support is a distraction at the moment.”
However, her conversion to Trumpian Maga politics has astonished some observers, particularly on culture war issues.
Now posing as a hardliner against trans and LGBT rights and diversity issues it was pointed out by one former civil servant who worked for her when she was a senior minister in charge of these issues that she used to be described as “the Queen of woke”. When she held the equalities brief some trans rights reforms took place under her watch.
Ms Truss is a regular visitor to the powerful Heritage Foundation in Washington DC which led the way in developing the ultra-conservative Project 2025 policy manual for the Trump administration. But her presence there has caused division among senior members who are split over her past record as a minister.
One source noted: “Liz was originally against Brexit and was for David Cameron. She was the Queen of woke.”
