Why is Liz Truss trying to be Danny Dyer with her new book?

Appearance: Etiquette dictates that you should never judge a book by its cover.

Yes, but do it anyway. It looks like a poster for one of those bad gangster films Danny Dyer used to make, featuring a shadowy set of tough guys – except, instead of Dyer front and centre, there’s Liz Truss.

So you’re saying this is a book – by Truss? Yes. The former prime minister’s new book is out next week. Its subtitle is A Short Book on How the Bank of England Broke the Bond Market and Brought Down the Government.

I have so many questions. Who wouldn’t? The response to her first book, Ten Years to Save the West, didn’t seem to guarantee that she’d get to publish a second.

OK, first: how short is short? Amazon states that the book comes in at just 99 pages. For reference, that’s about 13 times shorter than War and Peace, or three times shorter than the 2012 memoir by Tulisa from N-Dubz.

Next: who on earth is publishing this? That would be Free Speech Press, which says it is “dedicated to publishing books that challenge conventional thinking”. Its authors include Jennifer Arcuri, who you might remember as that woman who claimed she had an affair with Boris Johnson, and the guy who went viral for saying you can grow concrete.

Mike Graham? That’s him. Actually, this is an interesting link: Graham also owns UKLive, the YouTube channel that now hosts Truss’s show.

Is that still going? Sadly yes. And by the look of recent videos – which include “Why Britain’s political system is completely broken”, “Britain is becoming a LOW-TRUST society” and “Defund the BBC” – she’s still scratching around the US right’s favourite talking points in the hopes that someone will love her again.

What has been the response to the announcement? Are people excited? Well, when Truss announced Bank Job on X, just six days before its publication date, replies variously retitled it as “Bankrupt” and – inevitably – “Lettuce Job”.

I suppose we should ask what the book is actually about. It’s the same drum that Truss has been banging since her embarrassment as PM: the country is secretly run by the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility, with this unelected cartel ensuring that Britain will never change.

Still, at least it’s nice and short. Exactly – it’s a toilet book, in the sense that it will probably do in a pinch if you run out of Andrex.

One last question. Go ahead.

The book is about breaking the bond market, and bringing down the government, but … But wasn’t it Truss who did that? Yes, it was her.