MOK, it’s not funny. I don’t know why you’re all giggling in the back, because – seriously! – it’s not funny. Or big. Or clever. Dropping a banner that reads “I ruined the economy” live on stage behind Liz Truss as she earnestly criticises Joe Biden’s handling of the economy from the heights of a provincial theatre in Suffolk is definitely not a fun affair.
Honestly, what’s so funny about a failed prime minister still promoting her book on how to save the West when she couldn’t save her own job? Would it be so funny, she sniffed shortly after she walked off the stage, if a far-right activist did that to a left-wing politician? The Led by Donkeys activists’ prank was designed to “suppress free speech” (hers), and certainly not the exercise of free speech (hers). It’s also not funny—seriously! Not funny!—that this stunt came just hours after she fiercely defended Elon Musk’s decision to allow X users to say whatever they want about other people on his platform, even if that seemed to end with bricks being thrown at police lately. Rioting is one thing, but disrupting a literary event? That’s going too far.
The really funny thing, though, is that until this spectacularly selfless little broadside, I’d felt a kind of strange, creeping sympathy for Truss. Security breaches at a public event, however innocuous, are never entirely funny for politicians in the current climate. And besides, the line between accountability and performative bullying is a fine one. Led by Donkey’s last such prank, in which she unfurled a giant banner on stage behind Nigel Farage proclaiming Vladimir Putin’s love for him, it felt like the former. But continuing to lash out at Truss when she’s so obviously down and out comes dangerously close to the latter. She’s already lost not only her high office but her safe seat in Parliament, plus any chance of whatever she’s trying to say on this otherwise increasingly obscure reading tour being taken seriously – to the point where you wonder how well she’s really coping with the repeated public humiliations.
Somehow, going to the Republican National Convention to cheer for Donald Trump when no one there has apparently heard of her, or publicly pandering to Musk when he disdainfully called her Liz “Lettuce” Truss at X, doesn’t seem like the behavior of a perfectly happy person. It’s more like the behavior of a socially inept teenager trying to get in with the popular girls and not quite understanding what she’s doing wrong. As she left the deranged book event, I couldn’t help but think of election night, when she left the stage pale and speechless after losing her seat. No human, no matter how thick-skinned, can be completely immune to the effects of having other people’s hostility hurled in their face so repeatedly and publicly. Yet, oddly enough, that’s exactly the argument against allowing Musk to turn X into a slobbering hatefest where users can act like sociopaths, and Truss has shown precious little compassion for the victims of this particular social experiment. Their outrage, it seems, is directed only at themselves.
In fairness to Truss, that statement inadvertently revealed something that is true of quite a few free speech campaigners: that, with some honorable libertarian exceptions, what they often want is less free speech for all than a safe place to say what they want to say, while dissenting voices are conveniently shouted down and pushed off the stage. It’s about being able to criticize someone else, as Truss did during that book event, without facing the same backlash. Or maybe it’s about buying a social media platform that your ex-wife told you was “being used by (woke) radicals for social engineering on a massive scale,” and instead launching your own competing social engineering project: firing the moderators, asking your fans to pay for the privilege of having their voices algorithmically elevated above everyone else’s, and then just letting the whole thing sink into the gutter until the people who disagree get tired of being abused into leaving. And then call it a victory for free speech.
Clearly there is a wider political argument going on about the limits of free speech – and it has always been limited, a qualified but not absolute human right – at a time when shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre seems downright innocuous compared to calling for hotels filled with asylum seekers to be burned down. The EU Commission is breathing down Musk’s neck, warning again that his website violates new EU laws to prevent the spread of disinformation, while Keir Starmer’s veiled suggestion that he would “take a more comprehensive look at social media regulation” in the wake of the riots has caused much furore. Screaming from the right about how no one knows what they’re allowed to say under this supposed new socialist tyranny. (Hint: it’s exactly the same thing you could say under the Tories, since the law on sedition hasn’t changed, although the provisions of the last government’s Online Safety Act could perhaps be implemented a little more quickly now.)
But if the inalienable right to hurl vicious racist abuse at black footballers – a right that X users can currently exercise confidently, if the platform’s alleged refusal to cooperate with a police investigation into the abuse directed at Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka or to delete the abusive tweets is to be believed – is the kind of strange little hill on which the right chooses to fight a Labour government, then I suspect Starmer will take it pretty calmly. Intellectually, this is all familiar territory for a man who, as Attorney General, warned against being too harsh on social media, but more importantly, free speech wars have remarkably little political traction beyond very angry online critics. The rate at which users and advertisers are abandoning X—for less toxic platforms like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky and Meta’s Threads, or simply to spend less time on their phones—suggests that many of us are now exhausted and disgusted by the culture that free-for-all has spawned.
So the test for Truss and other free speech campaigners who are thrashing ever louder to a dwindling audience is simple: do they, deep down, like the world they have created, where everyone is constantly angry at everyone else? Now that they too are drowning in a swamp of stinking spite, do they really feel happier, healthier and more content with their lives and society in general? Because if not, then for once they are the laughing stocks.
