Opinion | Liz Truss plays 'China card' for riches

By Grenville Cross

In 2022, Liz Truss made history. Having become the UK's prime minister on Sept 6, she lasted for only 49 days, until Oct 25. It was not only the shortest tenure in British history, but also one of the most abysmal.

Truss trashed finances with a doctrinaire mini-budget that broke Britain. She cut taxes, expanded borrowing and defied economic logic. As interest rates soared, sterling collapsed. She triggered the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades, and found herself in deep trouble.

After sacking her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, she blamed everybody but herself for the chaos.

The British people, however, had her measure from the outset. A month after she entered No 10 Downing Street, Yahoo News UK commissioned JL Partners to assess the national mood, and the results were damning. Its survey revealed the most common word to describe Truss was "incompetent", although "useless", "untrustworthy", and "clueless" found favor with many.

On Oct 21, 2022, when Truss resigned, the Conservative Party stood at only 14 percent in the opinion polls.

The freelance journalist Tanya Gold has known Truss since their university days. She said "there is nothing to her beyond ambition". Whereas Truss "cannot speak easily or from the heart", she had, in her early life, a "tendency to rewrite her life for advancement". She recalled Truss' call for the abolition of the monarchy in 1994, a stance she retracted upon joining the Conservative Party.

Boris Johnson's chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, understood Truss perfectly. He told Gold she was obsessed with optics, and had no idea how to be prime minister. Although Johnson chose her as his successor, it was only because he was "aware she would self-destruct, and he might plausibly return".

Although Truss' time in No 10 was ignominious, her afterlife has been little better. It has been characterized by prejudice and greed, with the two often overlapping. Instead of honorably withdrawing from public life, she has milked her wretched legacy for all it is worth.

She calculated that, if she banged the West's anti-China drum loudly enough, she would benefit, and so she has. Her profile has endured, and her coffers have prospered.

Although, while serving in David Cameron's government in 2014-16, Truss was happy enough to visit China and extol constructive ties, she changed tack once he departed.

In 2022, for example, when she sought the Conservative Party leadership against Rishi Sunak, she rallied support by accusing him of being "soft on China", and it initially paid off.

After leaving office, Truss — as The National (Scotland) reported on July 4, 2023 (having accessed parliamentary records) — was paid thousands of pounds for speaking engagements around the world, with China invariably being her target. Up to July 4, she pocketed 191,088.02 pounds ($242,297) from speaking engagements, foreign travel and the like.

In February 2023, when she visited India, she was paid 65,751.62 pounds, expenses apart, for a speech at a Mumbai conference she attended for four hours. Having told her hosts India should be a permanent member of the UN Security Council, she warned of "the real threat that China poses."

When she visited Japan the same month, Truss was paid a measly 6,443.60 pounds for a two-hour speech at Tokyo University. However, she was not out of pocket as her flights and accommodation (and those of her aide) were covered by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).

Whereas IPAC was created by the Hong Kong Watch functionary, Luke de Pulford, in 2020, it is well resourced by China's antagonists. Its funds come from the US National Endowment for Democracy (known as the "second CIA"), the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (created in 2003 with support from the Taipei government), and the Open Society Foundations (founded by George Soros). IPAC operates as an anti-China hate machine in national legislatures, and delights in besmirching Hong Kong.

On Feb 17, IPAC organized a Tokyo symposium. Its purpose was to discuss China's "threats to Taiwan, its use of economic coercion, its growing long-arm policing and malign operations abroad, as well as its gross domestic human rights abuses". It was, thus, a glorified hate fest for global Sinophobes.

For example, the ex-prime minister of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt, was flown in to call for a "new style" NATO to counter "China's unacceptable ambitions".

Truss herself demanded China's economic dominance be challenged "before it's too late", and denounced "the disgraceful dismantling of 'one country, two systems' in Hong Kong". This must have delighted IPAC's executive director, De Pulford, whom she praised for "his hard work behind the scenes at IPAC".

While not profiting significantly from the Japan trip, Truss was more than compensated by the 32,000 pounds she received (expenses excluded) for her subsequent speech in Bern, Switzerland, in June.

In April, when Truss flew to the United States on a five-day visit to address the Heritage Foundation, her family got in on the act. Although she did not hit the jackpot, she nonetheless charged her hosts approximately 7,600 pounds for the flights and accommodation of not only herself and her aide, but also of her husband, her two children, and a staff member. In gratitude, she used her speech to call on the West to be tougher toward China.

On Dec 14, moreover, she bagged 30,000 pounds for what was described as a two-hour "speaking engagement, including a Q and A, at XLoD Global Conference" (a financial services event in London).

In 2023, however, Truss' big money earner was her five-day trip to Taipei in May, portrayed as a show of support. Whereas the local government paid her 10,841 pounds for flights and accommodation, she received 80,000 pounds from the Prospect Foundation (PF), a local think tank linked to the Democratic Progressive Party. On May 17, therefore, she criticized China's ideology and urged the West not to work with Beijing.

Before her Taiwan trip, Truss' colleagues made clear it was unsavory. The Conservative chair of Parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Alicia Kearns, said it was little more than a vanity project, aimed at keeping her profile high. She called it "performative, not substantive", and "the worst kind of Instagram diplomacy". However, Kearns would have had no idea of Truss' massive PF payment.

During the national security tiral of Jimmy Lai Chee-ying on Jan 2, Truss sensed another opportunity for mischief-making. Her pretext was the opening address by the prosecution, which named two British nationals — De Pulford and Global Magnitsky Justice founder Bill Browder — as co-conspirators. Although the three-judge panel will determine if this was true, IPAC was not amused.

On Jan 2, De Pulford, by video, decried his own naming and condemned the "invented charges" and "sham trial" of Jimmy Lai. He also described as "long overdue" the imposition of sanctions on not only the chief executive, John Lee Ka-chiu, but also on the Police Force's expatriate British officers who combated the black violence of 2019, which was true to form.

In 2020, De Pulford was prominent in failed efforts to bring terrorism charges in the English courts against five British police officers who helped to save Hong Kong from chaos the year before.

Having declared that "Commonwealth judges must finally withdraw from the Court of Final Appeal", De Pulford also called on investors to recognize that Hong Kong was now "a risky place to do business".

If De Pulford sounded demented, nobody should be surprised, given his track record. He is understood, for reasons best known to himself, to idolize one of the prosecution's key witnesses in the Jimmy Lai trial, Andy Li Yu-hin, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to endanger national security. De Pulford even displayed Li's image on the wall behind him during his video, which was revelatory.

As for IPAC, it also rushed out a statement, presumably drafted by De Pulford, that "strongly condemns" his naming and the "sham trial" of Jimmy Lai.

It will be fascinating to see what use, if any, prosecutors make of De Pulford's outburst. In one view, he may even have fortified the prosecution's case against Lai.

In any event, Truss also decided to weigh in on Lai's trial, perhaps at IPAC's behest. If she plays her cards right, it might also finance some of her foreign junkets in 2024.

On Jan 9, Truss called on the British foreign secretary, Lord (David) Cameron, to issue an "urgent and unequivocal statement of support" for De Pulford and Browder. She called the trial "trumped up", and demanded "robust action" (perhaps a gunboat), but there was more.

She also said she hoped Cameron "will support" the claims of "reported mistreatment" of Andy Li, aired by the Washington Post. She was probably briefed about Andy Li by IPAC, which is also trying to derail Lai's trial.

Although it is not known if Truss was paid by IPAC for writing to Cameron, her intervention was extraordinary. As a former justice secretary, she should have known that any attempts to interfere with an ongoing trial can amount to the offense of attempting to pervert the course of public justice.

Her comments, moreover, were hypocritical, and contrasted with her silence in 2016, when, as justice secretary, she failed to defend British judges. After the Court of Appeal's judges were branded "enemies of the people" by the Daily Mail, for their Brexit judgment, Truss failed to spring to their defense.

Although it was suggested she felt it inappropriate to condemn the independent media, it was also speculated she did not want to antagonize the powerful pro-Brexit lobby.

However, unfortunately for Truss, the then-lord chief justice of England and Wales, Lord (John) Thomas, broke his silence in 2017. He told the House of Lords that Truss was "completely and utterly wrong" to say she could not criticize the media. It was "absolutely essential" that judges were "protected because we have to act as our oath requires us without fear or favor".

Although Thomas said he regretted having to criticize Truss "as severely as I have", he had no choice as "she was completely and absolutely wrong". He emphasized her duty was to defend the judiciary, and her failure to do so had left the judges "very concerned". He himself had sought police protection.

Perhaps more than anything else, this sordid episode exemplified what Truss' career was all about.

Having failed to defend British judges, she has also failed to support Hong Kong's judicial system, even though it is one of the most professional in Asia. In 2022, while foreign secretary, she also urged British judges serving in Hong Kong's top court to resign (which all but two ignored). Even the former governor, Chris Patten, criticized Truss for treating the judges that way.

It beggars belief that Truss felt in any way qualified to comment upon judicial proceedings in Hong Kong. She may, of course, have been paid by IPAC, but nobody in their right mind, least of all Cameron, could take her seriously.

What greater fall from grace could there be for a former British prime minister than to end up in the slush with the likes of De Pulford, a named co-conspirator.

A careerist of the worst sort, Truss' legacy was lamentable. If, however, her future is to consist of ranting away on the money trail, it will be even more inglorious than her past.

 

The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong SAR.

The article was first published in China Daily.