Having been invited to speak at a far-right conference in the USA she had to come up with a new spin to explain her failure. So she span her magic wheel of excuses and came up with trans people who obviously control the Deep State.
Truss is the political gag that just keeps running. For a recap, under her premiership then chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng came up with a budget scribbled on an envelope that they failed to get analysed, as required, by the Office of Budgetary Responsibility. This budget was a disaster with lots of unbudgeted tax cuts. This caused a minor meltdown in the financial sector that resulted in interest rate hikes that is still causing problems for many home owners.
At the time she was blaming lefty financial institutions for undermining her leading to her eventual removal from the Prime Minister role. It needs to be emphasised that it was the Conservative party that asked her to go. No one else.
Role forward to this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference at the National Harbor in Maryland. She is still totally in denial about her incompetence and seeking to blame others. She did not, of course, that it was fellow Conservatives who asked her to leave.
This time in freewheeling stream of whining she made various accusations, the sort that far-right people make when their delusions crash up against the harsh reality of fact. So her choice quotes include…
“What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself”, that would be the Conservatives concerned about tanking the economy.
“Now people are joining the civil service who are essentially activists,” … “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”. One of the basic rules of the Civil Service is they have to carry out their roles within agreed procedures which include ensuring that the agreed compliance steps are adhered to and that they don’t break any laws. They don’t have control over government policies. Among the roles of senior civil servants is to delve into the detail of any proposed policy to understand its impacts and advise Ministers appropriately.
The far-right object to their ideas being scrutinised intelligently. Intelligent people make them uncomfortable.
As to the Civil Service being over run with trans activists there is little information. There is a survey from 2022 that puts the number of LGBTQ employees at 6.1%. There is no figure for trans people, but based on the 2021 census about 0.5% of the population identify as trans so it’s reasonable to assume a similar proportion for the Civil Service. Not many then.