Stefan Rousseau/PA
Liz Truss managed to shift a paltry 2,228 copies of her book in the first week of sales, Nielson data shows.
The former prime minister has entered the bestsellers’ list at number 70, below RuPaul’s memoir and an air-fryer cookbook.
It also lands below Confessions of a Forty-something F**k Up, which is a little like the book title Truss should have considered, Confessions of a Fortysomething’s F**k Up.
Compared to memoirs released by other former prime ministers, Ten Years to Save the West falls below the 21,000 copies sold by David Cameron in its first week and well short of Tony Blair’s autobiography, which managed to shift 92,000 copies in the same timeframe.
Margaret Thatcher was estimated to have sold 500,000 copies of her memoir but other past occupants of No 10 have mixed records when it comes to book sales.
John Major’s memoir sold just 5,415 copies in its first week but went on to exceed 200,000 in total. Edward Heath’s The Course of My Life struggled to surpass 20,000 copies, while Gordon Brown’s My Life, Our Times sold about 30,000.
Although Truss’s figures pale in comparison, she beat both on a copies-sold-per-day-in-Downing-Street basis.
The book has received mixed reviews since being released, with a Guardian reviewer describing it as “one of the most shamelessly unrepentant, petulant, politically and economically jejune and cliche-ridden books I’ve read”.
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