What Liz Truss’s coffee habit says about her

According to excerpts from Out of the Blue, the cursed biography of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and The Spectator’s James Heale, Truss is dependent on two things for comfort: Instagram and espresso. On a trade delegation to New Zealand, she’d ‘had so much coffee and just wasn’t interested in meeting the ambassador’.

Coffee is from Ethiopia. Its origins as a foodstuff are murky, but the best legend is about a goatherd called Kaldi who in the mid-9th century noticed that his goats ate black beans and became manic and sleepless: essentially, they started dancing. From there, coffee spread to Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Persia.

But when coffee met Christianity there was the moral panic that reliably comes when a powerful new stimulant is found. It was called ‘the bitter invention of Satan’. Venetian clergy condemned it – they were more emotionally dependent on religious-themed portraiture, to be fair – but Pope Clement VIII (1536-1605) liked it, and it took over from wine and beer. (I fantasise that most pre-modern people were drunk all the time, and who can blame them? But with coffee you do not meet your hangover at lunch.) It rose in western Europe in the new coffee houses alongside news, which is another drug: coffee and news belong together, as Truss acknowledges. Coffee is now the second most traded commodity in the world, after crude oil. They aren’t so different: one is for machines, the other is for people.

Ethiopians mixed coffee beans with animal fat and ate them. Turks crushed them in water and boiled them. The French dripped hot water through them. The Germans invented the filter system; the Italians the three-part stove-top Moka pot, which I favour, while the Swiss created the convenient and disposable coffee pod which is a metaphor for our times. (I fret that all that will be left of our civilisation in a million years will be buried coffee pods and disposable nappies. What will aliens say?)

Espresso was born in Venice in the early 20th century, when Luigi Bezzera used steam to force boiling water through finely ground coffee. Venice first tried to destroy coffee and later gave us its purest form.

It does not surprise me that this is Truss’s drug. It is speed for people reluctant to break the law – find the dream and chase it to its end. Unexpected rise and rapid fall: coffee is a metaphor for her life. It makes you bold, aggressive and unable to hear. It is another anaesthetic, and another shell. She should have gone to where it is grown: the espresso at the coffee shop on the Blue Mountain in Jamaica made my eyeballs cold and my tongue shrivel. Racing from photoshoot with Union Jack umbrella and bicycle to coffee cup paints a life. Truss dreams deeply, and she dreams alone.