Look, it’s not funny. I don’t know why you’re all sniggering at the back because – seriously now! – it’s not funny. Or big. Or clever. Dropping a banner reading “I crashed the economy” live on stage behind Liz Truss, just as she was earnestly criticising Joe Biden’s handling of the economy from the lofty heights of a provincial theatre in Suffolk, is definitely not a laughing matter.
Honestly, what is so amusing about a failed prime minister still out there plugging her book about how to save the west, despite having been unable to save her own job? Would it be so funny, she huffed shortly after stalking off stage, if some far-right activist did this to a leftwing politician? The prank by activists Led by Donkeys was to “suppress free speech” (hers), and very definitely not an exercising of free speech (theirs). Nor is it funny – seriously! Not funny! – that this stunt happened hours after she fiercely defended Elon Musk’s decision to let X users say whatever they liked about other people on his platform, even if that did lately seem to end in bricks being thrown at the police. Riots are one thing, but disrupting a literary event? Now that’s crossing the line.
The really funny thing, however, is that right up until this spectacularly unself-aware little broadside I had been feeling a kind of strange creeping sympathy for Truss. Breaching security at a public event, however harmlessly it’s done, is never wholly a laughing matter for politicians in the current climate. And besides, there’s a fine line between accountability and performative bullying. Led by Donkeys’ last such prank, involving unfurling a giant banner on stage behind Nigel Farage professing Vladimir Putin’s love for him, felt like the former. But continuing to kick Truss when she is so very clearly down and out swerves dangerously close to the latter. She has already lost not just high office but her safe seat in parliament, plus any chance of whatever it is she is trying to say on this otherwise increasingly obscure book tour being taken seriously – to the point where one wonders how well she is really coping deep down with the repeated public humiliations.
Somehow going to the Republican convention to cheerlead for Donald Trump even though nobody there seemed to have heard of her, or publicly cosying up to Musk despite him scornfully referring to her on X as Liz “Lettuce” Truss, doesn’t seem the behaviour of an entirely happy person: more that of a socially inept teenager trying to get in with the popular girls, who can’t quite work out where she is going wrong. When she walked out of the disrupted book event, I was reminded of election night, when she left the stage white-faced and speechless after losing her seat. No human being, however thick-skinned, can be wholly immune to the effects of having other people’s hostility shoved quite this repeatedly and publicly in their face. Yet, funnily enough, that’s precisely the argument against Musk being allowed to turn X into a spittle-flecked hatefest where users are free to behave like sociopaths, and Truss has shown precious little compassion for victims of that particular social experiment. Her outrage, it seems, is only for herself.
In fairness to Truss, what she accidentally revealed in that statement is something true of a fair few free-speech warriors: that with some honourable libertarian exceptions, what they often want isn’t so much free speech for all as a safe space to say whatever they themselves like, while dissenting voices are conveniently shouted down and bullied off the stage. It’s to be able to criticise someone else, as Truss did during that book event, without accepting comeback in kind. Or maybe it’s to buy a social-media platform that your ex-wife told you is “being used by (woke) radicals for social engineering on a massive scale” and embark on your own rival social-engineering project instead: sack the moderators, invite your fans to pay for the privilege of having their voices algorithmically uplifted over everyone else’s, and then just let the whole thing descend into the gutter until people who disagree with you get sick enough of being abused to leave. And then call it a victory for free speech.
Clearly there is a broader political row coming on the limits of free speech – and it has always been limited, a qualified not an absolute human right – in an era where shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre seems positively innocent compared with urging people to burn down hotels containing asylum seekers. The EU commission is audibly breathing down Musk’s neck, issuing renewed warnings about his site breaching new EU laws on preventing the spread of disinformation, while Keir Starmer’s veiled hint that he would “look more broadly at social media” regulation after the riots has triggered much rightwing squawking about how nobody knows what they’re free to say any more under this supposed new socialist tyranny. (Top tip: it’s exactly the same stuff you could say under the Tories, given the law on incitement hasn’t changed, though conceivably the provisions under the last government’s Online Safety Act could now be brought in a little more quickly.)
But if the inalienable right to throw vile racist slurs at black footballers – one that X users can currently exercise with confidence, judging by the platform’s reported refusal to cooperate with a police investigation into abuse levelled at Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka or to take the offending tweets down – is the kind of weird little hill on which the right chooses to fight a Labour government, then I suspect Starmer will be pretty relaxed about that. Intellectually, all this is familiar turf for a man who as director of public prosecutions warned against taking an overly heavy-handed approach to social media, but more importantly free speech wars have remarkably little political traction beyond the very angrily online. The rate at which users and advertisers are deserting X – for less toxic platforms such as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky and Meta’s Threads, or just to spend less time on their phones – suggests many of us are now exhausted and repelled by the culture a free-for-all has produced.
The test for Truss and other free-speech warriors shouting ever louder at a dwindling audience is, then, a very simple one: deep down, do they really like this world they have created, in which everyone is permanently furious with everyone else? Do they genuinely feel happier, healthier, better about their lives and society in general now they too are drowning in a swamp of stinking vitriol? Because if not, then for once the joke really is on them.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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