It’s a top social media quote, often attributed to Maya Angelou and cited all the way to cliché hell: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
What the great Angelou actually said was: “Believe people when they tell you who they are. They know themselves better than you.”
The first is an Oprah Winfrey twist.
Both come into question when two people named Liz present themselves in radically different guises to their earlier selves.
Liz Truss, the British foreign secretary, was once an anti-Thatcher Liberal Democrat with republican leanings before joining the Tories and flying the Remain flag for the sake of her children and British trade. “I don’t want my daughters to grow up in a world where they need a visa or permit to work in Europe, or where they are hampered from growing a business because of extortionate call costs and barriers to trade... ,“ she said shortly before the 2016 Brexit referendum.
As environment, food and rural affairs minister she delivered a stark warning to members of the British Food and Drink Federation. If they were Norway and wanted to export goods, they would have to fill in 50 boxes of forms every time. To export British beef and lamb to the US, her department had just been obliged to fill in a thousand page form which was only one part of an eight-stage process – and would still require a resolution to be passed by the US Congress. Be very careful about taking that single market for granted, she advised, it’s “not a sexy, exciting thing to explain, but it is really crucial to the growth we’ve seen in food and drink exports in 40 years”.
I’m old enough to remember marching against the Iraq War manufactured by Liz Cheney’s loathsome father among others
Even allowing for the power-freakery and zero self-awareness of many politicians, Truss Mark 1 appeared to be one of the most convinced and convincing of David Cameron’s Remain advocates. More importantly, she was right. Six years on even the British rightwing papers are gazing balefully at Brexit.
But who is the real Liz Truss? The early truth-teller? Or the one making Northern Ireland stability a creature of the ERG and her prime ministerial ambitions, fomenting international instability, robbing precious bandwidth of other governments in a time of war and global crises?
For contrast, have a look at a woman on the reverse trajectory.
I’m old enough to remember marching against the Iraq War manufactured by Liz Cheney’s loathsome father among others. Everyone is old enough to remember when Liz Cheney denounced the first impeachment of Donald Trump as a sham when he was up on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Indeed Oprah, we remember when she told us who she was, a hard-core Trumpist and brazenly partisan Fox News regular, and we believed her the first time.
Now some new version of Liz Cheney has kicked in and blindsided everyone in one of the most head-melting shifts in political history.
As vice-chair of the January 6th committee hearings on Capitol Hill, this Liz Cheney is embarked on a task of almost mythological endeavour. Being the former GOP star and consummate insider, only she knows how Trumpist America’s cultural cynicism and denial really works internally. And she must find a way to demonstrate to that crowd, clearly and indisputably, that he did not simply lose the election but that he was fully aware he had lost it even while fomenting insurrection on the Capitol. And also that he was simultaneously bilking them out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Though why any of this should have surprised either of the Liz Cheneys is a mystery.
A star-struck Trump took all his cues from Putin in turn, right in front of the cameras. Both still have their fans here as the world continues to polarise and explode
She explains her mission in terms of her children. “I looked at my boys in the weeks after January 6th; it became very clear that we might suddenly have to question [the peaceful transition of power].” Then again, six years ago, Liz Truss Mark 1 explained her Remain mission in terms of her children too.
Like or loathe her, this Liz Cheney’s fight is our fight too. Six years ago, wannabe autocrats everywhere were massively emboldened by Trump’s election. A star-struck Trump took all his cues from Putin in turn, right in front of the cameras. Both still have their fans here as the world continues to polarise and explode.
Cheney’s sacrifices in the form of her career, the estrangement of her Republican peers who paint her as an obsessive, the relentless vile attacks from Trump fans, the security concerns, the self-examination required to take up this burden, are acts of heroism.
But in the end it all comes back to the electorate, in her case a deep red Wyoming district where she trails her Trump-financed primary opponent by 28 per cent.
As for Liz Truss, in an ethically functioning world her voters would be incandescent now if they believed her when she told them who she was the first time. Yet they gave this Truss Mark 2 nearly 70 per cent of the vote last time out. Perhaps the time has finally come for Oxford to issue an urgent recall of its political alumni to inspect their ethical software.
In the meantime, there is a better Maya Angelou quote: Courage is the most important of the virtues, because without it, no other virtue can be practised consistently.