Why Liz Truss's attempts to reinvent herself as a global champion of free speech are a sick joke: PETER HITCHENS

By PETER HITCHENS, COLUMNIST AND COMMENTATOR Published: 01:01, 7 August 2026 | Updated: 02:54, 7 August 2026 Our one-time Premier, Elizabeth the Brief, otherwise known as Liz Truss, has now become the great Apostle of Freedom of Speech. On the British TV station GB News, she has been calling fervently for such freedom. And not only there. In the US she has a growing audience of libertarian admirers. But what would her new fans do if they discovered that she had imposed a draconian and endless penalty on a British citizen, for saying things she disliked? How would they react if they found she is now uninterested in his deepening plight? Let's get this quite straight. In the US, the First Amendment to the Constitution would bar any government from punishing anyone from speaking freely. There's more. Ms Truss now says explicitly that she wants a First Amendment here. In June, she appeared, all smiles in a frilly shirt, on GB News, and argued that very case. You can still watch her doing so on YouTube. She said free expression had been undermined by legislation and institutions, that people should be able to express views without fear of state silencing, and that power had shifted too far from elected politicians to courts. Is that so? What then of the British individual, Graham Phillips, 47, now exiled and impoverished thanks to a decision taken by Ms Truss, who, as Foreign Secretary, used her powers to sanction him? It is an amazing case. Real, harsh, state cruelty is surely something from the distant past, or from fiction – Banishment For Life, The Man In The Iron Mask, Exile or, of course, Franz Kafka's sinister story about a man pursued day and night by dark officials for an unnamed crime. Surely that's all buried in the past, or at least limited to despotisms such as Russia? Liz Truss said free expression had been undermined by legislation and institutions, that people should be able to express views without fear of state silencing What then of the British individual, Graham Phillips, 47, now exiled and impoverished thanks to a decision taken by Ms Truss, who, as Foreign Secretary , used her powers to sanction him? How glad we all should be that such things have come to an end. Yet they have recently made a modest comeback, in Britain of all places. And they have done so on the say-so of freedom-loving Liz Truss. Let me tell you about Mr Phillips, the man she punished, now the Exile of Mariupol. British born, he used to be a junior civil servant before moving to Ukraine in 2010, where he first taught English and then worked as a journalist. When the war broke out, his largely pro-Russian video-blogging saw him kicked out of the country. He now lives in a semi-derelict building in Mariupol, a war-ravaged city in Russian-occupied Ukraine, which is visited almost nightly by bomber drones. He lives largely on the charity of neighbours. He is not, in my view, a very nice man, and I do not like him. Yet, as the great US Supreme Court Judge Felix Frankfurter once said: 'The safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.' Mr Phillips has done some wrong and stupid things and has expressed some foolish opinions. For me, his worst action was his cruel interrogation of a badly wounded Ukrainian prisoner of war, shown on his video blog. Others have condemned his interview of Aiden Aslin, a British citizen who had been fighting with Ukrainian armed forces and was captured by the Russians. It has been suggested that the interview was a breach of the Geneva Conventions. But no action has been brought against Mr Phillips on those grounds. He has been convicted of no crime. No police officer has arrested him. He has never been charged with an offence against our laws. No jury has found him guilty. Yet in July 2022 Liz Truss sanctioned him for what she saw as his Putinist propaganda. The official wording says that his offence was to 'produce and publish media material'. It's a direct penalty for writing, speaking and publishing – normal in totalitarian states but not here. The decree complains that this material 'supports and promotes actions and policies which destabilise Ukraine and undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine'. Who knew a few video blogs had such power? Ukraine remains remarkably stable. When Mr Phillips tried to fight this, the High Court explicitly accepted that the sanctions interfered with his human rights under Article 10 (freedom of expression), Article 8 (private/family life), and Article 1 of Protocol 1 (property). But the judge ruled that this was proportionate and lawful in pursuit of the legitimate aim of 'protecting UK national security and supporting Ukraine'. So much for 'human rights', when they matter. And so the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has punished him with great severity. He is forbidden by law to earn money, or to pay for anything. His bank account is frozen. We are all likewise forbidden by law to pay him any money. He cannot return to England because he cannot buy a plane ticket, which – together with Ukraine and the European Union both banning him from entering their airspace – means he's trapped in Mariupol. What would Liz Truss's applauding US audiences make of her action in exiling Mr Phillips for expressing an opinion she personally did not like? And what does she say about all this now? Likewise, he is banned from paying any bills, such as the council tax due on his London home – a debt that Islington Council demands he pay. In the most recent act of this farce, his UK bank says that it will not take payment instructions from him unless he comes to England and gives them in person. For obvious reasons, he cannot do this, lest he breaks the law. Just the other day, some rather brave and generous lawyers, acting without fee, argued that the council should cease their pursuit. We await the judgment. But if the court rules against him, it is not clear what will happen to his home. If he were a convicted prisoner, sitting in jail for a crime of violence or dishonesty, which he isn't, he would be exempt from that very same council tax. Nor is there an apparent end to his sentence. No limit was fixed or has ever been stated. And there is no obvious lawful way of ending it. He is, as far I can discover, the only person in the world being punished in this way. All the other people sanctioned by their own states have second passports and can dodge the effects by living out of their reach. At the time of the sanctioning, Ms Truss was a militantly pro-Ukraine Foreign Secretary, once posing in Moscow in a fetching fur hat, despite it being quite warm weather. Soon afterwards, she famously became Prime Minister, and soon after that, even more famously, she became Not Prime Minister. In the turmoil of her life since then, has she somehow forgotten that day in July 2022 when she approved the decree sending Graham Phillips into a bottomless chasm of unfreedom, because of some opinions he had expressed about the Russia-Ukraine war? What would Liz Truss's applauding US audiences make of her action in exiling Mr Phillips for expressing an opinion she personally did not like? And what does she say about all this now? Well, like so many in the political realm, she does not speak directly to people such as me, and instead I have to rely on her Representative on Earth, known as 'sources'. Those sources say that Ms Truss, so talkative about liberty on public platforms, has no comment to make beyond referring me to the Foreign Office – whose stonewalling responses on this matter I have already many times experienced. So much for Ms Truss, the born-again libertarian. 'Furore' as Knights of Malta bigwig resigns role