‘I went inside Liz Truss’ bizarre right-wing convention as she imports Donald Trump’s circus to Britain’

When I heard Liz Truss tell a cavernous ballroom in Texas she was bringing CPAC to London, I was practically giddy with delight.

I knew that any attempt to import America’s biggest Trumpfest to the UK would either be tremendous fun, or a hilarious disaster.

CPAC, for the uninitiated, is an enormous right-wing, pro-Donald Trump conference that flits between Washington DC, Florida and Texas. It attracts speeches from senior members of Trump’s cabinet, prominent figures on the American right, not to mention, usually, the President himself. Also, for some reason, Liz Truss and Nigel Farage.

And the attendees are a delicious mix of scurrilous lobbyists, Reagan-era Republicans and some of the most colourful characters on planet Earth. There are MAGA hats as far as the eye can see, and everyone is delighted to talk to you about their views, which often challenge the definition of sanity.

While the stakes of politics – on both sides of the pond – have rarely seemed more grave, I’ve always tried to temper the gloom by leaning into the absurdity that’s never far behind.

So I had high hopes for CPAC GB, thinking maybe Britain’s least successful Prime Minister would be able to transplant at least some of my favourite political circus across the pond.

It’s safe to say it’s been a mixed bag.

Despite Liz Truss being the host, Nigel Farage was clearly the headliner. He rocked up on Saturday afternoon, for some reason deciding to deliver his first speech of the Clacton by-election campaign to a small room of right-wingers in London.

And yes, it was small. The medium-sized ballroom was set up with 500 seats, and for most of the conference there have been bums on about a third of them. More turned out for Nigel, Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg, but it was never a struggle to sit down.

There have certainly been moments of levity. Liz tried her hand at a golf simulator – at which she later admitted to me she wasn’t very good. Reform UK’s Andrea Jenkyns told a preposterous anecdote about showing her son Little Britain and Father Ted, claiming he’d laughed his head off before asking her: “Mummy, why don’t we laugh like this any more?” Jenkyns claims she replied: “Unfortunately, you can’t show these things in schools… at the moment.”

Truss has perhaps been at her least self aware since she left Number 10. Across various appearances on the stage, she moaned about the frequent turnover of British Prime Ministers, predicted Andy Burnham would crash the economy and accused her own party of having been “ideologically captured” by “DEI”.

I’ve long-suspected Truss pictures herself as Britain’s answer to Donald Trump – although she acknowledged her dream of a “Trump-style revolution” was a work in progress.

One of my favourite pastimes at CPAC is doorstepping Liz Truss – who has inexplicably appeared at the conference in the states every year I’ve attended. In three years of running down corridors asking questions like “do you think you’d have been a better Prime Minister if you’d had a chainsaw?”, she’s never once given me an answer. Funny that.

So when I approached her in the exhibition at CPAC GB, I felt sure I’d get the brushoff. “Liz,” I said. “I’m not going to chase you down a corridor this time. Can we have a chat?” She rolled her eyes and agreed. I’d just interviewed Jacob Rees-Mogg, whom, whether you agree with him or not, is always a good sport, and was happy to answer questions about why the event was so poorly attended: “It’s the first one….Not a lot of people know what CPAC is.”

Truss was a bit more cagey, and accused me of “left-wing whataboutery” when I asked about some of the people attending her conference who were …maybe not far-right, but pretty far to the right of her.

Because along with the format, the branding and the weird crypto sponsorship, Truss has imported the deeply low barrier to entry that is a less pleasant side of CPAC in the states.

Once in DC, I accidentally interviewed one of America’s most prominent white supremacists – a bearded, softly-spoken middle-aged man, who expressed some pretty hardline views on immigration while we chatted. When I looked him up later, I learned he was such a prominent racist that he had a newsletter and a page on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of famous racists. In recent years they’ve welcomed leaders of the Proud Boys and January 6th rioters to the conference.

Truss’ event in London welcomed a broad church of the British right-wing. The mixing of Tory and Reform MPs and candidates alone caused a bit of a row at CCHQ.

But off the stage, on the conference floor was another set of younger, harder right influencers. Teenage online provocateur Young Bob was there for the whole conference. And in the bar following Nigel Farage’s speech, I spotted Nick Tenconi, the leader of what’s left of UKIP – who once called for Brits to “outbreed the invaders”.

I asked Liz Truss whether she was comfortable with people like this attending a conference she was chairing, and she said she was. “It’s a group of people who care about the future of Britain,” she said, before she accused me of trying to “dehumanise” people on the right of politics.

“We’ve had some conservatives on stage as well,” Truss told me. “This conference isn’t really about party politics, it’s about what do we actually do to fix Britain. People are talking about the issues, like people are being jailed for free speech. I hope the Mirror is campaigning on that.”

She added: “I believe in a free press, Mikey, which is why you’re here.”

I didn’t mention that she and a string of the people she’d invited to speak on the stage had attacked the media (occasionally calling out the Mirror by name) for having the temerity to point out that not many people had turned up to her party. It didn’t seem like a productive argument to get into with a former Prime Minister.

This week’s conference has been described by The Times’ Oliver Dean as a “pound shop MAGA rally”, a description so perfect it seems daft to try and come up with a better one. If Britain’s worst Prime Minister really does want to unite the right for her “Trump-style revolution”, she’s certainly going about it by taking some cues from America’s worst President.

And it seems she’s happy to take some of the right’s less savoury characters along for the ride.