Liz Truss, currently wowing the Conservative party conference notwithstanding her disastrous record as the 45-day prime minister who tanked the economy, looks set to be immortalised on celluloid – or at least in a streaming-platform miniseries. Reports have emerged that screen rights have been sold for Out of the Blue, the 2022 account by the Sun political editor, Harry Cole, and the Spectator’s political correspondent, James Heale, of her “unexpected rise and rapid fall”. So who should be in the frame to play Truss?
1 Meryl Streep
The automatic candidate if the script makes it to Hollywood – with the added attraction that Streep has played a prime minister before: Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.
2 Billie Piper
Having starred in series such as Secret Diary of a Call Girl and I Hate Suzie, you would not necessarily associate the former pop star turned actor with the alt-reality of political life. That said, she may well have acquired intimate knowledge of the ultra-rightwing mindset through her eight-year marriage (they divorced in 2016) to the currently suspended GB News presenter Laurence Fox.
3 Lady Gaga
Not as mad as it sounds, especially if the film-makers go down the fantasy music route – a serious creative option. Get rid of the meat dresses and fetish gear, put Gaga in front of a dialogue coach to get the accent right and you can just see her belting out songs called things such as Why I Am Right (And Everyone Else Is Wrong) or Kwarsi and Me.
4 Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds
Squint a bit and you can see who Truss may have been modelling her look on; she was even photographed wearing a pink trouser suit in 2019. Of course, British politics is just crying out for the Supermarionation treatment, in the style of Team America: World Police – just think of all the scenes of projectile vomiting at Covid parties and screaming incoherently at newspaper articles about wilting lettuces, etc etc. A winner.
5 Olivia Colman
This is a realistic choice. On the face of it, Colman does not look much like Truss, but stick her in a blonde wig and her genuinely chameleonic abilities and readiness to take anything on means she could handle it, for sure. Colman’s portrait of a raddled Queen Anne, traumatised by the effect of supreme power, in The Favourite would only need a few tweaks, one would think, to capture the end-of-days atmosphere in No 10. Truss’s dead-eyed self-delusion and absolute shamelessness might make her a gift to perform, but Colman, you suspect would find a grain of empathy in the character that is necessary to stop the audience putting their collective boot through the screen.
