Trussbook: Lettuce be Clear...

...This Has Nothing to Do With Free Speech

Liz Truss is back. Sort of.

This time, she’s not crashing the pound or sacking chancellors. No, the latest reincarnation of Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister is as the founder of an “uncensored” social media platform - a supposed antidote to mainstream media “censorship” and a safe space for “free speech.” She announced the plan at a cryptocurrency conference in Bedford (tickets: £250 to £1,000), in front of a packed audience eager to hear tales of how the global elite cruelly cut short her radical tax-slashing dream.

If you missed it, don’t worry. Most people did.

But in a world where political failure increasingly leads not to quiet retirement but to ever louder self-promotion, Truss’s latest act is entirely on-brand. She appears to be swapping Number 10 for a server farm (not a lettuce farm), attempting to rebrand not just her career, but the very idea of what it means to be silenced. This platform, she insists, will be “uncancellable.”

It’s a bold claim. Especially from someone who remains very much on the speaking circuit, continues to receive front-page coverage, and is clearly neither cancelled nor censored - just uninteresting an unpersuasive.

Free speech? Or free pass?

Let’s start with the basics: Liz Truss is not being silenced. She is not a political prisoner. She has not been banned from social media, de-platformed on the lucrative ex-PM speaking circuit, or blocked from TV/Press interviews. On the contrary, she’s rarely stopped talking since the day she resigned - and the press has duly reported her every return to the microphone.

What she appears to object to is not censorship, but criticism. Like many populists before her, Truss confuses the two. “Free speech,” in this new vocabulary, doesn’t mean the right to be heard - it means the right to be applauded, unchallenged. Her new platform promises freedom, but only for those who already agree with her. Everyone else, presumably, is part of the problem.

In this sense, it’ll be less a digital town square and more a padded cell for fragile egos.

The ghost of Prime Ministers past

Truss’s reasoning for launching this venture, as she explained in Bedford, is that she was “cut off at the knees by the economic establishment and the elites” when she tried to pursue her agenda in Downing Street - namely, slashing taxes for the wealthy, reviving fracking, and shrinking the state. But rather than reflect on the impact of those decisions - market chaos, soaring mortgage costs, a crash in the value of the pound - she’s chosen to reframe her downfall as the work of a shadowy cabal intent on silencing radical voices.

This isn’t a credible political argument. It’s a weird form of therapy, performed in public.

Her venture appears to mimic another notorious political reinvention: Donald Trump’s launch of Truth Social. But where Trump commands a loyal and organised following, Truss commands… well, polite confusion at best, and mockery at scale. The lettuce that outlasted her premiership has become a cultural reference point for a reason.

You don’t build a media empire on vibes and victimhood alone. And yet, that seems to be the plan.

Trussbook: coming (not so) soon

There’s also the small matter of how she intends to pull this off. Building a functioning social media platform is a technical and financial mountain - one that has already defeated others with far deeper pockets and broader reach.

Trump’s Truth Social only survives due to regular injections of cash from sympathetic billionaires and a core user base willing to follow him off any cliff. Even Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, has struggled to keep Twitter/X both relevant and solvent.

By contrast, Truss has no such financial firepower and no movement to mobilise. Who’s queuing up to join a platform centred around the political vision of a former Prime Minister who left office in disgrace after just 49 days?

As Phil Moorhouse, host of excellent YouTube channel A Different Bias, pointed out: “Where is she going to get the money to build an actual social media platform? I can’t wait to see how hard this fails.”

Indeed, the smart money says it won’t so much be a platform as a glorified group chat - a slightly shinier Discord server where Truss and her dwindling band of libertarian nostalgists can talk about fracking and inflation without anyone fact-checking them.

What this is really about

Truss’s announcement, in the end, tells us more about the state of modern politics than it does about the tech industry. This isn’t about building something new - it’s about rewriting the past (as much of the far-right agenda is). It’s the next logical step in her attempt to absolve herself of responsibility for a premiership that ended in economic embarrassment and international ridicule.

This isn’t unique to Truss. It’s part of a broader trend where failed leaders turn to alternative media ecosystems in search of redemption, rebranding their collapse as a conspiracy. The platform isn’t a means to communicate a vision. The platform is the vision: a place where failure is reinterpreted as martyrdom, and where truth is whatever the founder wants it to be that day.

It’s politics without accountability - a retreat into a digital echo chamber built on grievance and make-believe.

Serious implications or a sideshow?

It’s tempting to dismiss all this as a harmless ego trip. But even failed ventures can have consequences. We’ve seen how fringe platforms become breeding grounds for conspiracy theories and hate speech, often slipping under the radar of responsible authorities until it’s too late.

The danger isn’t that Truss will succeed. The danger is that she might create yet another corner of the internet where fact and fiction are indistinguishable, and where her own delusions are treated as doctrine. At a time when Britain is crying out for integrity, clarity, and grown-up politics, this is a step in the opposite direction.

It’s also a distraction - for her, and for us. While Truss busies herself with ghost-platforms and deep-state fantasy, the real challenges Britain faces - inequality, stagnation, democratic decline - go unaddressed by those who still claim to offer answers.

Final thoughts

Liz Truss does not lack a voice. She lacks credibility.

This platform, even if it gets off the ground, will not be a bold defence of free expression. It will be a refuge for denial - a digital monument to a legacy that cannot accept the verdict of history. And while we can and should meet her ideas with reasoned rebuttal, we should also recognise them for what they are: not dangerous in themselves, but desperately, embarrassingly unserious. Ridicule is probably still our most appropriate weapon where Truss is concerned.

She once dreamed of shaking up Britain. Now she’s launching a website.

There’s a sad symmetry to that - a Prime Minister who tried to bulldoze the economy in a matter of weeks, now retreating to the comfort zone of likes and shares from equally deluded sycophants.

Let her talk. Let her post. But let’s not pretend this is anything more than what it is: a footnote. One last cry into the void from a vacuous political career that ended not with a bang - but with a lettuce.