Taxpayer campaigners 'disgust' at 'ludicrous' £8 million cost of Liz Truss prime ministerial portrait

FLESH FOR FANTASY: A leaked photograph of the official portrait appears to show a scantily-clad Truss in fantastical medieval battle armour. (Bazake Media)

Bazake has exclusively obtained a leaked image of former prime minister Liz Truss's official portrait ahead of its scheduled formal reveal to the public in January.

The image, shown in full below, appears to depict the short-lived Conservative party leader dressed in minimal clothing and body armour, stood in front of classical ruins whilst brandishing a sheathed sword. Above her, her predecessors Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher look down from a cloud. They are joined, presumably in heaven, by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II who passed in the first few days of Truss's premiership.

The artwork, by Duncan Fallon who is believed to be a second cousin of Truss, has sparked a flurry of concern amongst tax justice groups who claim it was commissioned at a reported £8,000,000 price tag.

Sebastian Malice of the Tax Vigilante group, told Bazake, "This is a complete and utter disgrace. £8,000,000 works out at over £180,000 a day because she was only prime minister for 44 days. And she's apparently related to this weirdo artist. It's nepotism."

Duncan Fallon, a 60 year old originally from Leeds, gained a degree of notoriety as one of the so-called Young British Artists in the 1990s. His 1996 multimedia artwork Nosh, which centred around a 3 meter animatronic Myra Hindley performing fellatio on fellow Moors Murderer Ian Brady, was a particularly controversial work at the time.

Fallon has since denounced his work from the final decade of the millennium and moved into what he self-describes as "furiously facist-adjaent traditionalist realism."

The painting, which is believed to have been commissioned by the Speaker's Advisory Committee on Works of Art in the House of Commons, looks set to cause further embarrassment for the Tories who currently lag some way behind Labour in opinion polls.

Chad Bosewick, a backbench MP for the Red Wall seat of Radcaster, told Bazake, "Imagine being in my shoes, having to go back up north to my constituents and say, 'Sorry guys, those idiots in London have spent nearly ten million quid on a portrait of our disastrous choice of prime minister.' They will take one look at me and say, 'That money should have been spent on gunboats to open fire on illegal immigrants.' It's put me in a ridiculous position quite frankly."