The former prime minister is teaching us a lot about narcissism in her new memoir, and it’s hard to tear your eyes away

Liz Truss’s memoir, Ten Years to Save the West, first penetrated the nation’s consciousness with her reflections on the death of Queen Elizabeth II. “Why me?” the former prime minister wrote. “Why now?” It was actually pretty funny, the depth and shamelessness of her narcissism; so funny, in fact, that I felt that, somewhere along the line, she had been stitched up by an editor. Fair play; I too would stitch her up in that job. It’s hard to be your best, most generous self towards a person you hold personally responsible for the fact that your mortgage is now 100% higher than it used to be.

But a kinder, more mature person would have at least scribbled in the margin: “Are you absolutely sure you want to connect yourself, who served for 49 days, with the death of death of a monarch who served the nation for 70 years?”

Have you heard the one about the missing Ocado delivery at Downing Street? It’s side-splitting stuff

British public life often tends toward sitcom, and you imagine that once the catastrophic economic fallout of her time in office has faded – in a generation or two’s time – Liz Truss’s 40-odd days in Downing Street might yet be viewed in those terms. Certainly, that seems the legacy she most craves.

The first extracts from her farcical book , Ten Years to Save the West , reveal it to be written with all those gifts for “Accidental Partridge” that she displayed in office (key quote: “For too long, the political debate has been dominated by how we distribute a limited economic pie. Instead, we need to grow the pie so that everyone gets a bigger slice.”). Her memoir’s most immediately memorable scenes are ready-made for canned laughter. There’s the one in which she spent her few days in power itching because of an outbreak of fleas in the prime ministerial apartment (a parting gift, she half-implies, of the Johnsons’ dog, Dilyn); the one in which her promise to the nation of “delivery, delivery, delivery” falls at the first hurdle of a missing Ocado order; the one in which she finds the fridge full of protein shakes labelled “Raab”, from her power-hungry colleague; and the one in which she struggles to get a mobile phone signal on a call with the US secretary of state and has to hang out of an upstairs window to hear about the invasion of Ukraine. There will never be a second season.

Short-lived PM also says she anticipated mini-budget ‘turbulence’ and compares herself to Brian Clough

Liz Truss ran for Conservative leader and prime minister despite her husband’s prediction that “it would all end in tears”, according to her book, Ten Years to Save the West, which will be published in the UK and US next week.

She agreed with an ally that the mini-budget she planned to introduce once elected would prompt “brutal turbulence”, then resigned after just 49 days in power , seeing herself as “the Brian Clough of prime ministers”. The Guardian has obtained a copy of the book.

Ex-prime minister, who lasted just 49 days, says she struggled to cope with death of monarch and self-inflicted economic disaster

In a new memoir, Liz Truss recounts the advice she was given by Queen Elizabeth II when they met in September 2022 to confirm Truss as Britain’s new prime minister, the 15th and as it turned out last, to serve under Elizabeth II.

“Pace yourself,” the 96-year-old queen said – a suggestion Truss admits she failed to heed after the queen died, leaving Truss unsure if she could cope.

Inherent flaws and political churn doomed Boris Johnson’s signature policy – and it was hobbled through bureaucracy and high inflation

• No progress made on half of levelling-up targets
• Report card: how the Tories’ pledges stack up today
• ‘We’re forgotten about here’: the broken promises

Last February, the Treasury lost patience with Michael Gove.

The levelling up secretary had just given a speech in Manchester during which he announced £30m to pay for improvements to substandard housing . Officials had already blocked him from using that speech to announce a larger pot of money for local authorities, and then they decided to stop him allocating any capital spending of £30m or more without Treasury approval.

PM spends 10 minutes sharing his innermost fears with the nation without offering any solutions

Nothing shouts “Don’t panic! Don’t panic” more than a hastily arranged speech from the prime minister outside No 10 at 5.45pm on a Friday. Still, on the plus side, those who chose to carry on watching Pointless on BBC One won’t have missed a thing. It would have been hard to tell the two apart.

Rishi Sunak is the politician’s anti-politician. If he ever came close to a real politician, he might dissolve on contact. Just as well there are so few of them in his cabinet. You could almost call it a talent – the unerring ability to do the wrong thing. To strike the wrong tone. To misjudge the situation. Every time you think things couldn’t get any worse, Rish! appears to say: “Hold my Coke.”

The label ‘Islamist’ is being used to stir up anti-Muslim feeling for political ends. Anderson is just part of that toxic trend

After Lee Anderson was suspended as a Tory MP for claiming that “Islamists” had “got control” of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, the coverage that followed was full of questions . Had the party acted quickly enough? Would the apology he refused to give really have been adequate? Were Anderson’s comments Islamophobic? Would senior Conservatives unambiguously condemn them?

The answers were unsatisfying. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself thinking of Jodie Foster. When presented with an apparently uncrackable mystery in the latest season of True Detective, Foster, as detective Liz Danvers, scolds her colleagues for “ not asking the right questions ”. The mystery of Anderson’s baseless attack on Khan, made with no apparent sense of political jeopardy, will not be solved by asking other Tories whether they will now say that it was beyond the pale. The right question is: why on earth would Anderson have thought there was anything wrong with what he said?

Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter and writes a monthly column on media, culture and technology

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

‘If you can’t call Islamophobia Islamophobia, then how are we going to fix it?’ says Sayeeda Warsi

Rishi Sunak has been urged to break his silence over a mounting Islamophobia row as senior Conservatives criticised the “dangerous” rhetoric of the party’s former deputy chair.

Lee Anderson, the MP for Ashfield, was suspended from the Conservative party on Saturday after refusing to apologise for saying Islamists had “got control of” Sadiq Khan . Anderson claimed on GB News that the London mayor had “given our capital city away to his mates”.