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26 June 2018

Liz Truss out-gaffes herself. Again

The chief secretary to the Treasury’s bizarre reference to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri raises an important question: has she ever seen a film?

By Media Mole

Liz Truss is a woman of many talents. Human meme. Leaf identifier. Oxford University Liberal Democrats president. Cabinet minister, somehow. Now the chief secretary to the Treasury has added another line to her CV: disrupter-in-chief.

If you don’t know what that means, then don’t worry. Neither does Truss. Here’s a handy summary: Talk about Airbnb + talk about Deliveroo + hashtags + ?????? = Conservative majority of 200. 

Tearing up red tape is a central plank of her exciting new vision for the state, or, rather, destroying it. She writes in today’s Daily Telegraph:

In my constituency, a local football team put up advertising hoardings around the ground that brought in thousands to the club but the council ordered it to take them down. If Frances McDormand can put up three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, why can’t we do the same outside King’s Lynn, Norfolk?

But as the Mirror‘s Dan Bloom points out on Twitter, there’s one slight problem with invoking the very fictional three billboards hired by an equally fictional character played by Frances McDormand as justification for your free-market fantasies. 

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What’s more, enterprising Britons are already putting up their own Ebbing-inspired billboards. And they’re not using them to advertise Deliveroo. 

Putting up billboards to criticise the Tories? As Truss might say: That. Is. A. Dis. Grace. 

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