Former chancellor also tells Hay festival ‘good riddance’ to Tory MPs defecting to Reform

Sajid Javid said that supporting Liz Truss in the Conservative leadership contest that ultimately made her prime minister was his “biggest mistake in politics”.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Wales while promoting his memoir, the former chancellor, who is no longer an MP, said there were friends in the Conservative party he remained in contact with.

May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and now Starmer: each one was brought low for a reason. But what if the deeper problem is the office itself?

They were times in which prime ministers seemed to be on their way out as soon as they’d arrived. The big strategic decisions the country faced were ducked or postponed. The public finances repeatedly wobbled, yet efforts to rationalise the tax system faltered in the face of vested interests, including farmers. Reforms to social security were trumpeted before being diluted. The whole business of politics was animated by rancour and rivalry, rather than practical action. All the while, populists waited in the wings.

This is not a sneak peak into a future history book about today’s Britain, but a description of the French fourth republic, which staggered after a difficult birth in 1946 until 1958, when the exhausted regime ceded the authority to create a new order to Gen Charles de Gaulle, effectively putting itself out of its misery.

Distracted, listless and unambitious – the PM’s true form has finally emerged. But whatever comes next must end this ruinous cycle

Finally, belatedly, an honest portrait of Keir Starmer has been allowed to form. It’s been a hell of a journey. At first he was sanctified as the Labour saviour, finally arrived. That gave way to pleas that he was essentially a good sort, new to politics and in need of time. Now an impression is emerging that he is, in fact, quite a bad egg. To quote a brutal recent summation from a Labour insider speaking to Politico: “Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth. Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth.”

The charges are now coming thick and fast. He cannot manage teams. He throws people under the bus to save his own skin. He cannot do the job. The whole Peter Mandelson affair, the latest instalment of which is the revelation that Mandelson failed his security vetting, and that Starmer claims not to have been told of this, has at least come with one silver lining. As his own ministers distance themselves from him and give up the ghost on live television, even loyal stalwarts can’t sustain their tedious, misguided speculation that he might be rebooted and come good. The broad conclusion is that Starmer is now beyond rehabilitation, and his fate only a matter of time. So what now?

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Who needs critics when the Reform man is so adept at patting his own back – and that’s easy to do in publishing: there’s a sales list for everyone

‘She’s produced a bestseller!” panted the Spectator. “Liz Truss’s new book has been out for less than 72 hours and it’s already sold out on Amazon.” Thus began the fairly widespread British media hallucination that the 45-day PM was once more igniting the nation with her 2024 book Ten Years to Save the West. In the end, Truss’s book sold 2,228 copies in the UK in its first week, which placed it at No 70 in the “bestseller” charts . The next week it had fallen back to 223, comfortably obliterated by any number of cookbooks, novels, self-help titles and sticker books, none of which had enjoyed anything like its level of publicity. You hear a lot about AI hallucinations, but rather less about the hallucinations suffered by journalists all on their own.

So, then, to the furore over the academic/recent Reform candidate Matt Goodwin’s new book, which I find at least as high-stakes for our culture as that courtroom battle between Gwyneth Paltrow and the – I think? – retired optometrist who accidentally skied into her.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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Exclusive: Reform UK will be ‘steering well clear’ of CPAC event in July, source says, as will senior Tories

Nigel Farage will snub a major conference of US conservatives that is being brought to the UK by Liz Truss.

The short-lived former prime minister, who was accused of crashing the economy, was chosen by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to lead a version of the event in the UK in July.

It’s awkward, nobody seems to know what is going on, and the president’s thumb is at half-mast. It’s almost a metaphor for diplomatic relations between the US and the UK

When Liz Truss tweeted a photo of herself standing next to Donald Trump, she captioned it “right about everything”. All that effort, all that security clearance and long-haul travel and whatnot, to reach the pinnacle of proximity to your spiritual leader, and that’s the best she could come up with? It was bafflingly lame. And yet the least confusing thing about this scene were the words.

What exactly is going on in this photo? Truss clearly knows where she is, because she’s grinning with a kind of victorious serenity, as if she’s finally achieved the plaudit she knew all along was hers. At the same time – not wishing to be unsisterly – she doesn’t appear to have brushed her hair, so it doesn’t feel like this photo opportunity was in anyone’s diary. It looks like a selfie you’d catch when you run into your favourite contestant from The Traitors on your way through an airport. No time to worry about your grooming; it’s the chance of a lifetime, every second counts.

Unclear how encounter between Britain’s shortest-serving PM and US president was initiated and how long it lasted

After spending time and resources crisscrossing the Atlantic to cultivate the support of the Maga faithful, Liz Truss has finally got the prize she apparently craved: a photo with Donald Trump.

Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister tweeted a photo on Sunday showing her in the company of the US president at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Meal at Mayfair club took place on day Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick criticised former PM’s mini-budget

If it was on the menu, a side helping of lettuce never made it to the table. Over blood-red steak and chips, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss came together on Monday for a discreet lunch at a swish Mayfair club, organised by a climate-denying US thinktank.

Lois Perry, a former leader of the far-right Ukip party who is now Europe director of the Heartland Institute, posted photographs, now deleted, on X of Farage addressing others, including Truss, at the meal.

Former prime minister allegedly wandering 5 Hertford Street to find members for her Mayfair club a street away

For Tory grandees licking their wounds and plotting their return after their disastrous 2024 general election performance, the opulent, fire-lit rooms of the exclusive club 5 Hertford Street are a sanctuary.

But in recent weeks, their long lunches have been rudely interrupted by Liz Truss, who has been accused of wandering the premises in search of members to poach for her own rival operation, just one street away, which asks “founding members” for an eye-watering £500,000.

Her delivery might be stilted – but Truss’ new YouTube show has grand ambitions: a ‘Trump revolution’ in Britain with the help of an influential US conservative ecosystem

Liz Truss, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, began the first edition of her YouTube show with a vow to unmask “the evil-doers” attempting to bring down Britain, the US and Europe. She would, she explained, reveal how an “international network of leftists work to subvert democracy and the will of the people”.

Despite her bleak monologue, Truss pointed to hope from across the Atlantic. “We’re going to look at the Trump revolution and see how this can be achieved in Britain,” she said. “We’ll be talking to the leading lights of the Maga movement.”

SuperLiz reboots herself inside a utility room, delivering nonsense so pure even her guests look trapped

We happy few. We unlucky few. In years to come when we are all still recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we will be able to say we were there. That we have seen things that cannot be unseen. The 8,000 of us who, through a mixture of curiosity and comedy, chose to watch Liz Truss commit a drive-by on herself. Though only a very few will have made it to the end.

Some won’t have even made it to the start. The show started an hour late because Liz forgot to put her watch back in October. Still, this was an award-winning YouTube TV show. Though not the awards anyone would want to collect.

Everyone’s favourite former PM is back! Her mission? To save Britain from its current ‘doomloop’ with, you guessed it, a YouTube talkshow

Will you be seeing a pantomime this year? Birmingham’s got Gok Wan and Biggins in Robin Hood, Bradford has Sinitta in Snow White, while Bromley landed Su Pollard for Beauty and the Beast. And at the end of YouTube’s infinite pier, there’s The Liz Truss Show, starring She’s-Behind-You herself. Curtain up on that one is tonight at 6pm.

According to the producers, Liz’s show “confronts the issues that others tiptoe around”. Wow. The lives, loves, and clinical explanations? Let’s just say I’d watch that. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the format. Instead, like all seasonal entertainment, The Liz Truss Show is based on a fairytale. “The deep state and their allies in the media and politics tried to destroy me,” madam explains in a statement, “now I’m back.” Are the gilt markets the deep state now? Honestly, I can’t keep up. You’ll remember that the irony of Truss’s flameout at the hands of market forces was particularly acute given that she had spent an entire career explaining that free markets were the greatest judge of absolutely everything. Small ideological adjustment: free markets are now the greatest judge of everything except the ideas and personage of Liz Truss.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Britain’s briefest PM kept her fans waiting before launching her latest plea for Maga attention in the form of a ham-fisted YouTube talk show

In the lead-up to the launch of The Liz Truss Show – the hot new YouTube series from Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister – one phrase was repeated time and time again: “They tried to silence her.” Turns out they didn’t need to, because Truss was perfectly capable of doing that herself.

Episode 1, she tweeted, would be available on Friday at 6pm. Except, on Friday at 6pm, it was nowhere to be seen. By 6.05, with still no sign of it, her faithful began to grow itchy. “Where’s your show?” they tweeted at her. A few more minutes passed. “FFS Liz get your act together,” sighed another.