Liz Truss has claimed Britain could have been launching missions to Mars by 2040 if her premiership had continued, in an extraordinary vision of an alternative future outlined in her new book.
The former Conservative prime minister, whose time in Downing Street lasted just 49 days, imagines a Britain transformed by her economic policies, with major legislation repealed, government institutions dismantled and the country emerging as a technological powerhouse.
Among the achievements she believes her programme could have delivered is a British space industry capable of launching missions to the red planet.
The prediction appears in the final chapter of her book, Bank Job, published on Monday, in which Truss argues that her government was brought down by the Bank of England and other establishment institutions rather than the consequences of her controversial mini-budget.
Her imagined future is set in 2040, almost two decades after she was forced from office amid turmoil in the financial markets.
And while much of the chapter is devoted to changes in taxation, regulation and the machinery of government, one particular claim has attracted considerable attention.
“Several missions to Mars have now been launched from Britain’s space port,” Truss writes.
Truss imagines the Britain she believes could have existed
The final chapter, titled simply “2040”, sets out the country Truss believes might have emerged had her political and economic ideas been allowed to develop.
In this imagined Britain, the government has stripped away many of the regulations and institutions she argues have held back economic growth.
The Equality Act, Human Rights Act and Climate Change Act have all been repealed, while the Office for Budget Responsibility has been abolished.
Truss also envisages the removal of remaining European Union laws, a more permissive approach to artificial intelligence and a dramatically different relationship between the Treasury and the Bank of England.
Her alternative economic system gives greater prominence to Bitcoin, which she imagines receiving tax treatment more closely aligned with conventional money.
The Bank of England, meanwhile, would work more directly with the Chancellor to coordinate monetary and fiscal policy, with government spending controlled more closely from Downing Street.
There is even a scene in which former Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown supposedly acknowledge that the political and economic approach associated with governments since 1997 had failed.
The chapter is presented as a speculative account of what Truss believes her policies could have achieved, rather than a record of decisions she had actually taken during her brief premiership.
But her ambitions extend considerably further than Westminster.
By 2040, she imagines Britain developing a space industry capable of sending multiple missions to Mars.
Britain’s space programme would have reached Mars
The claim has attracted attention partly because of the enormous gap between Britain’s existing space capabilities and the infrastructure required for interplanetary missions.
Britain has an established aerospace industry, contributes to international space research and has been developing domestic launch facilities intended to support commercial satellite operations.
SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland is among the country’s most prominent projects, with facilities designed to support vertical launches.
However, sending spacecraft towards Mars is a considerably more complex undertaking than launching small satellites into Earth orbit.
Interplanetary missions require sophisticated propulsion systems, navigation, communications and the ability to operate spacecraft across enormous distances.
A crewed mission would present additional challenges involving life support, radiation exposure and the safe return of astronauts, although Truss’s quoted passage does not specifically say that people would be travelling to Mars.
Her prediction does not establish how such a programme would have been funded, which organisations would have delivered it or what role Britain would have played alongside other international space agencies.
Instead, the claim forms part of her wider argument that deregulation, lower taxes and a different approach to economic management could have transformed the country’s industrial and technological capabilities.
For Truss, Mars appears to represent the scale of the ambition she believes Britain has lost.
The 49-day premiership that ended in financial turmoil
Truss became prime minister on 6 September 2022 after defeating Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership contest.
She entered Downing Street promising a radical programme of tax reductions, deregulation and economic growth, arguing that Britain needed to abandon what she regarded as an overly cautious approach to public finances.
But her premiership quickly unravelled following the mini-budget presented by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on 23 September.
The package included substantial tax reductions without accompanying forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility or a detailed explanation of how the measures would be funded.
Financial markets reacted sharply, with sterling falling and UK government borrowing costs rising.
The turmoil in the gilt market placed severe pressure on pension funds using liability-driven investment strategies, prompting the Bank of England to intervene with emergency bond purchases to restore stability.
Mortgage markets were also affected as lenders withdrew or repriced products amid rapidly changing expectations for interest rates.
The crisis weakened confidence in Truss’s leadership and prompted a series of humiliating policy reversals.
Kwarteng was dismissed, Jeremy Hunt was appointed Chancellor and the government abandoned much of its original economic programme.
Truss announced her resignation on 20 October, leaving office on 25 October after just 49 days, making her Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister.
She subsequently lost her South West Norfolk parliamentary seat at the 2024 general election.
Truss still blames the Bank of England for her downfall
More than four years after leaving office, Truss remains adamant that the explanation for her government’s collapse has been misunderstood.
Her new book is titled Bank Job: A Short Book on How the Bank of England Broke the Bond Market and Brought Down the Government.
The title reflects her argument that decisions taken by the Bank of England and other financial institutions played a decisive role in destabilising her administration.
She has repeatedly criticised the Treasury, the Office for Budget Responsibility and elements of the civil service, accusing the country’s economic establishment of obstructing the changes she wanted to introduce.
Her argument is that Britain had become dependent on a system of economic management which protected existing institutions while preventing the radical reforms she believed were necessary for growth.
Critics dispute that account, arguing that the central problem was the loss of market confidence following the government’s unfunded tax commitments and the absence of independent forecasts.
The Bank of England’s emergency intervention was announced after turmoil had already developed in the gilt market, and was intended to address risks to financial stability.
Truss nevertheless continues to maintain that the events surrounding her departure demonstrate the power of unelected institutions over elected governments.
Her imagined future in 2040 provides a much broader account of what she believes Britain was denied when her premiership ended.
New book attracts scathing reviews
The publication of Bank Job has generated a distinctly mixed response, with several reviewers taking issue with both Truss’s account of her downfall and the conclusions she draws from it.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, commentator Simon Heffer delivered an exceptionally hostile assessment of the book.
Heffer described it as the most deranged serious political thesis he had encountered, giving it a zero-star review.
The criticism is particularly notable given that it came from a right-leaning newspaper rather than one of Truss’s traditional political opponents.
The Financial Times also questioned the book’s central argument, drawing attention to the former prime minister’s increasingly radical political positions since leaving office.
Truss has rejected the attacks, accusing her critics of failing to engage properly with her claims about the Bank of England and the events of 2022.
On the day the book was published, she accused her opponents of launching increasingly extreme establishment attacks and encouraged readers to examine her arguments for themselves.
The Mars prediction has provided an especially memorable detail from a book otherwise dominated by financial institutions, constitutional reform and monetary policy.
It has also renewed attention on how differently Truss interprets her premiership from many of those who experienced the economic turbulence that accompanied its collapse.
From the mini-budget to Mars
Since losing her parliamentary seat, Truss has remained active in international conservative politics, increasingly associating herself with movements that advocate smaller government, lower taxation and opposition to established political institutions.
Her latest book continues that approach, portraying her premiership not as a failed experiment but as a reform programme abandoned before it could deliver results.
The imagined Britain of 2040 is consequently a country in which many of the organisations and laws she has spent years criticising have disappeared.
The Office for Budget Responsibility no longer exists, the relationship between government and the central bank has been transformed, and regulations governing equality, human rights and climate change have been swept aside.
Truss believes the result would have been a more prosperous, technologically advanced country with the confidence to pursue extraordinary scientific projects.
Her account does not resolve the arguments over the 2022 mini-budget or establish whether the proposed reforms would have produced the growth she anticipated.
Nor does it provide a detailed route from the economic programme she attempted to introduce during her 49 days in office to an operational British Mars mission.
Nevertheless, the final chapter leaves little doubt about the scale of the future Truss believes the country missed.
By 2040, in her imagined Britain, the institutional reforms are complete, the economy has been transformed and several missions have already departed from a British spaceport for Mars.
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