Liz Truss: the normie playing the rebel

Liz Truss began her career at that plucky start-up, Shell. She moved on to Cable & Wireless, which was founded in a tempest of risk-taking and rule-breaking. In 1869. Her wild card of a chancellor never got around to being an entrepreneur or (unless we count a hedge fund boss) working for one. Truss is a scion of the public sector middle class. Kwasi Kwarteng could not have passed through a stabler set of institutions — Eton, Harvard, JPMorgan — had he interned at the Vatican.

None of the credentials of mavericks but all of the pose: whatever else is said about these two, they are of their time. A co-authored treatise, were it honest, would be called something like Move Slow and Say Things. 

When did normies start doing this? When did status and lustre come to reside in cheeking the establishment? What happened to joining it? Truss and her backers will believe that financial markets are made of “sheeple” in thrall to “group think” and “orthodoxy”. The more the bourses convulse, the surer the government will be that it is on to something. I don’t want here to go into the question of whether they are right. The point is rather their relish in dissent. Why do such conventional people so enjoy filing the minority report?

Americans will know the type. The most intriguing Donald Trump voters I met there weren’t the most extreme. They were upper-middle people in several senses — age, income, education — who had never been able to play the rebel before. What he conferred on these country club and Chamber of Commerce types was the glamour of transgression: a sort of second youth. Again, I don’t say they were misguided. I just report the glee with which they cocked a snook. So much upheaval in the west of late has been caused by the contrarianism of the banal.

No one sweats to join a club to change the carpet and burn the house rule book

How to explain it? Samuel Johnson was wrong that men think less of themselves for never having soldiered. Still, the further a society gets from its last existential test, the more desk-bound and temperature-controlled the texture of life becomes, the more some innate human need for risk goes unmet. And so it finds alternative outlets. The boom in martial sports is one that Chuck Palahniuk saw coming in Fight Club. Another is the proliferation of a kind of sham maverick in public life.

It is reported that Truss’s supply-side reforms are known internally as Operation Rolling Thunder. Besides the question of taste — the name comes from a bombing campaign in Vietnam — who speaks like this? This is going to a Rage Against the Machine gig at 50. This is popping a collar and taking a long drag of a cigarette. It is iconoclasm as interpreted by someone who has never put anything on the line. In this, she is less bad than some of the friendly wonks and pundits (note again the low-stakes work) who will her to “smash” Britannia’s chains.

This stuff is new. The rebel pose, a generation ago, wasn’t de rigueur among the mid-life bourgeoisie. You weren’t being faulted for your “received wisdom” over cocktails by men called Hank and Bob. For all their inner zeal, the Thatcherites were stylistically trad. But then memories of war and other dark times weren’t quite so remote. There wasn’t as much ennui to seek relief from. Or virility to prove. Propping up civilised order was as high-status as “disrupting” it has become.

Normies acting otherwise: if I am vigilant to this fraud, it is because I commit the inverse one. Someone with my tastes and sensibilities should live in Hackney, not Hampstead, but something, some arriviste chippiness, needs the imprimatur of an establishment neighbourhood. My instinctive reaction to being smeared as “elite” is to blush at the compliment. (“Made it, ma.”) A psychobabbler would say it goes back to the childhood angst of waiting for the Indefinite Leave to Remain letter from the Home Office, then the naturalisation one, then the passport. No one sweats to join a club to change the carpet and burn the house rule book. “Provocative, throwaway lines,” is what a former Truss colleague, Rory Stewart, says she trades in. I can picture the smirk: the sense of safety behind it.

janan.ganesh@ft.com

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