Prime Minister Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership was the shortest in British history, but the Conservative stalwart appears to be playing the long game to set her country on a rightward course. That was the impression she conveyed in a live interview on The New York Sun’s “Sanity” podcast with hosts A.R. Hoffman and Rebecca Sugar. 

Central to Ms. Truss’s vision is a label that she attaches to herself: “anti-establishment.” It’s a position that reflects her view that liberal politics have captured Britain’s institutions — a reality she believes many Conservative Party members fail to grasp.

Ms. Truss traces this institutional shift to Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose reforms fundamentally restructured Britain’s judicial and bureaucratic systems. When Conservatives returned to power in 2010, they had an opportunity to reverse these changes but declined to take up the challenge, she says. 

The result, Ms. Truss argues, is a country run by “a left-wing system, with left-wing people in all the key positions — the Bank of England, the bureaucracy, the senior judiciary.”

When she became prime minister in 2022, Ms. Truss took a different approach. Within days of taking office, she unveiled an ambitious growth agenda centered on tax cuts and deregulation. While American think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute endorsed her free-market reforms, her Conservative colleagues balked.

“And why is that?” Ms. Truss asks. “Because they wanted to go along with the left-wing orthodoxy. They didn’t want to be unpopular with the dinner party set. They wanted to get jobs in corporations after they left office.” 

This reluctance to challenge the status quo, Ms. Truss contends, has allowed Blair-era politics to dominate Britain regardless of which party holds power. But now the wheels are coming off: The public is growing dissatisfied with the status quo and both parties are polling poorly. Ms. Truss predicts Britain is approaching a “counter-revolution against the Blair-ite state.” 

“Unless you repeal the Human Rights Act, unless you make the judiciary accountable again, unless you replace the senior people in the Home Office, you’re not actually going to be able to do anything,” Ms. Truss says. “The practical actions that need to be taken will require a total change of the British system because this is a system problem.” 

Looking ahead to Britain’s 2029 general election, Ms. Truss frames the fundamental choice starkly: Any incoming government must decide whether to “take on the bureaucracy and Blair-ite laws on Day One, or be consumed by them.”

Ms. Truss points to President Trump’s administration as an instructive example of confronting bureaucratic resistance.

“Donald Trump probably understands this better than anyone because he faced it in 2016,” Ms. Truss observes. “He knew what they were trying to do. He knew how people allegedly on his side were working to undermine him.”