Liz Truss is promoting whiskey and Tony Blair is backing AI. Who comes out on top?
Illustration by David Foldvari
Let’s have an ex-prime minister-off! Living ex-prime ministers, that is. One of the old ones and one of the young ones; the longest-serving and the shortest-serving. In the red corner, Sir Tony Blair, Labour. Length of tenure: 3,707 days. General elections won: three. In the blue corner, Liz Truss, Conservative. Length of tenure: 49 days. General elections won: nought. Let’s stick them both in the metaphorical ring and see who wins.
They’ve both been in the news as usual but this boxing analogy probably came to mind because of what Liz Truss has been doing. She’s made an online video with a bare-knuckle boxer to promote his make of whiskey. His name is Dougie Joyce and apparently he’s a big deal in Manchester’s Traveller community and once described himself as “the next Tyson Fury”. He keeps busy: in 2022 he launched Joyce’s Irish Whiskey and in 2024 he was sentenced to 19 months for grievous bodily harm after he assaulted a 78-year-old man at a wake in a pub.
He can’t have been out long and the whiskey marketing must have suffered in his absence, which is presumably why he asked Liz Truss to make a promotional video with him. I’m not sure it’s the perfect match image-wise. It’s not quite Stephen Fry and Twinings tea. But Joyce may not have been able to get anyone he asked for, what with assaulting that pensioner and a growing squeamishness among celebrities about associating themselves with selling alcohol. And it seems there was no fee: Truss was reportedly paid nothing for the video.
With those constraints, the guys at Joyce’s Irish Whiskey had to be realistic when selecting a brand partner. They couldn’t shoot for the moon, particularly if they’d set their heart on an ex-prime minister. I don’t know whether they asked any of the other ex-prime ministers. If not, I still don’t think we can infer that Truss was in any meaningful sense their first choice. They were just saving time. I’m pretty sure that none of John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak would have agreed to appear for free in a shit homemade video with a convicted criminal advertising his booze label. Obviously, if they’d offered a fee, they might have got Johnson.
So I can understand why the video happened from Dougie Joyce’s point of view. He seems pleased with the result and paid Truss generous compliments on Instagram: “Having her there truly meant a lot and added a distinguished touch to the occasion.” Certainly more distinguished than his previous high-profile event, but then that was a beating in the back room of a pub. For him this function at Scunthorpe United FC with Liz Truss could be the first rung on a ladder that leads all the way up to a Christmas promotion deal with Fortnum & Mason.
This event is, in a small way, one of the strangest things ever to have happened
What I don’t understand is why Liz Truss did it. It’s extremely undignified. She’s sitting in the corner of a noisy room holding a bottle of whiskey. Dougie Joyce says to the wobbly camera “Just remember, Dougie Joyce loves ya,” (apparently that’s his catchphrase) and then Truss says, also to camera, “Liz Truss loves you” and there’s laughter from behind the lens and a general sense of everyone being stupidly thrilled.
One or two people have taken the time to condemn Truss for this. A source speaking to the Sun called it “a serious lapse” and a Times editorial asked: “Is this really the best way for the former leader of a G7 country to spend her days?” I don’t feel either comment captures the reality: this event is, in a small way, one of the strangest things ever to have happened. It made me take a step back and contemplate the majesty of Truss’s achievement (if majesty is an appropriate word to use about a prime minister who had a dead monarch on her hands within three days of taking office). Having packed her brief premiership with incomprehensible choices, it’s amazing that, since leaving office, she has become even more incomprehensible.
Tony Blair’s choices, on the other hand, are easy to read. His current shtick is saying that AI is the future and we have to embrace it. He’s very upbeat about the improvements it could bring and, coming from a 72-year-old man, that’s refreshing. The late, great comedian Barry Cryer also had that gift. If he had any curmudgeonly instincts in his old age, he ruthlessly suppressed them and was always enthusiastic and welcoming to new comedians. He’d collaborated with the likes of Graham Chapman and Kenny Everett, so had plenty of laurels to rest on, but he was determined to keep liking new comedy and, when it comes to the arts, that is an admirable instinct.
There’s not necessarily anything wrong with it in technology either but Blair brings out the cynic in everyone and I’m no exception. The deep psychological need he must feel not to be yesterday’s man, not to be defined in a world that’s changing at a terrifying rate by events long past and a political career that ended in a discredited war, is bound to colour his opinions and pronouncements.
I’m not saying he’s wrong to be keen on AI but he probably hasn’t come to that conclusion from a place of dispassionate neutrality. He wants to think it’s great, to be a man associating himself with all that is new and revolutionary. His aesthetic rejection of the old-fashioned wouldn’t allow his brain to think what most of us do about AI: it’s frightening, it’s going to take livelihoods if not lives, and our teetering democracies are in no position to direct or regulate this approaching tsunami of innovation.
So his AI optimism brings me no comfort, while Truss’s every mad decision, her every poorly reasoned attempt at self-justification, makes me smile. The piffling billions her government lost the country may turn out to be cheap at the price for the decades of joy she will bring. This is what Blair can’t understand: whatever wonders AI may work, it threatens to destroy the deep and unfathomable hilarity of human error.
Social links
Copyright © 2025 Tortoise Media
All Rights Reserved
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.