No, Liz Truss didn’t blame ‘trans mafia’ for failure at Tory conference

It really says something that a satirical, unbelievable quote about trans peope, attributed to Liz Truss, is being mistaken as genuine by many people online. The former prime minister’s track record hardly gave her much of a defence, it has to be said, but still…

A fake quote attributed to Truss blaming an “underground transgender mafia” for causing the end of her short-lived premiership in 2022 is the latest claim to be doing the rounds.

In a world where Donald Trump declares that Kamala Harris wants to perform “transgender operations on illegal aliens”, it makes sense as to why many would believe the quote to be real, but it’s about as true the false quote credited to former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon that the failed PM was “about as much use as a marzipan dildo“.

The idea of a clandestine criminal circuit of transgender people operating in the halls of power at Westminster was shared by Political For You, an account on X/Twitter which labels itself as satirical and has previously posted that the iceberg lettuce which outlasted Truss’ spell as prime minister wants to move on from its association with her.

“BREAKING 🚨🚨🚨,” the account heralded in a post on Monday (30 September), copying the style of important news alerts from official outlets. “Liz Truss claims ‘underground transgender mafia’ were plotting against her and brought her leadership to an end, [and that] they’re the ones really running this country.”

So far, the post, which includes picture of Trump-fan Truss at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham on Monday (30 September), has been viewed more than 1.6 million times, liked by more than 3,000 people and shared 2,500 times.

Unfortunately, disappointing though it is for us to say, the quote is totally false. However, Truss did speak at a fringe event during the conference and still managed to shoehorn in a long list of bonkers things.

Speaking Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley, she claimed that had she been in charge during the general election in July, the Conservatives would have fared much better than under Rishi Sunak’s leadership.

“When I was in No 10, Reform was holding at three per cent [in the polls],” she said. “By the time we got to the election, I think they got 18 per cent because we promised change that we didn’t deliver.” She added that the party’s “best chance of winning would have been to have kept Boris [Johnson]”.

Truss also said the next Tory leader needs to get rid of the Equality Act and Human Rights Act and purge “the wokery marching for our institutions, the human rights culture embedded in government”.

Rather than endorsing any of the candidates for the position, Truss said she was a “huge fan” of Javier Milei, the right-wing president of Argentina whose tough austerity measures have pushed millions of his countrymen into poverty – and who has reportedly said that his four dogs named themselves.

The fact that so many believe the quote to real is not totally unexpected, given the fact that Liz Truss previously blamed “trans activists” in the civil service for her disastrous premiership.

In February, she appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), as did Nigel Farage and former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2021 while awaiting trial on charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

She told the audience that she had faced a “huge establishment backlash” while in Number 10.

“People are joining the civil service who are essentially activists,’ she claimed. “They might be trans activists, they might be environmental extremists, but they are now having a voice within the civil service in a way I don’t think was true 30 or 40 years ago.

“So, we just have a wholly new problem and, frankly, a hundred political appointees doesn’t even touch the sides in terms of dealing with them.”

Prior to this, she described supporters of LGBTQ+ people as “left-wing extremists” and expressed support for banning trans women from single-sex spaces and enacting laws that would prevent transgender youngsters transitioning.  

Given time, we guess Liz Truss could still blame that underground trans mafia for something…

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