The classic movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has an amusing opening scene: the boy is lying on the floor listening to All The Way From Memphis and the eponymous Alice asks, “Why do we need to listen to Mott The Hoople 24 hours per day. Can you tell me that?” (Something that bears an extraordinary resemblance to my own house, where I’m regularly asked the same thing.)
The inclusion of that song in the movie opened the eyes of Mott frontman Ian Hunter to a ‘nice wee earner’, when he discovered producers of big-budget movies are more than happy to pay good money for the soundtrack. The money he was paid for using that song – for a mere 118 seconds (together with earnings from Mott The Hoople’s 1974 US tour) – was enough for him to buy his house mortgage free in Chappaqua, New York.
While he spent the 1980s out of the music industry raising his youngest son, Ian Hunter found movie producer after movie producer not batting an eyelid when he’d ask, say, $75,000 as a fee for writing the theme song. To Hunter that was huge money he could live on for a couple of years in those days; to the movie producer, it was akin to a rounding error or ‘coffee money’ in terms of the overall budget. All in all Hunter wrote songs for 35 movies, laughing all the way to the bank each time.
My point in mentioning this is that when you think something is ‘big stuff’ yet the other chap considers it ‘small potatoes’ you can do well by repeating the formula indefinitely. What you don’t do is up the ante until the other fellow considers it significantly more than his previous impression – you don’t turn ‘coffee money’ into an elephant. And it was this mistake that Liz Truss made in the last few weeks, which has cost her everything.
A better course of action would have been to highlight some incredibly silly items of government expenditure, make fun of it and ask the rhetorical question of whether British taxpayers ought to continue such nonsense. Equally, she could have asked the question as to whether a penny off the income tax rate is really the end of the world (it’s only a penny). Further she could have made reassuring noises to the old Etonian grandees in the Tory party that someone with her background wasn‘t going to cause all sorts of problems, just be a bore.
Instead, Liz Truss seemed to think she could undertake a series of breathtaking moves that broke about every rule in Macchiavelli’s The Prince, and succeed on persuasion, rather than, say, lining up the votes beforehand. She had tax cuts and spending cuts announced without any consultations whatsoever (it would seem), had to do a U-turn, then, in a truly suicidal move, sacked her most senior old Etonian cabinet minister.
So it all came crashing down with a humiliating resignation announcement.
Instead of heading a government that could easily have regenerated the British economy, Liz Truss is now a pub quiz question in perpetuity. I don’t have any sympathy for her as I think any politician who ignores Machiavelli deserves everything they get: his ‘rules’ are as inviolable as those set out by Adam Smith on economics.
