Who will succeed Liz Truss? It doesn’t matter: each Tory MP is as guilty as the last
No one can deny that Liz Truss was a dire front person for her own economic policies, offering a demeanour that had all the reassurance of a random stranger plucked off the street to become your local school’s headteacher. Having turned her own citizens into lab rats for an experiment brewed in the boardrooms of opaquely funded rightwing thinktanks, she has now been barred from the lab itself. Buried by the very “markets” she once fetishised, the prime minister is terminally wounded, fronting policies that, just days ago, she would have savaged as coming from the “anti-growth coalition”. Demanding the removal of Truss is something of an abstract question because, in any meaningful sense, she is no longer in power.
But beware what happens in the coming days and weeks. We must not let the Conservative party blame this all on Truss, anoint her successor, and then regroup and reset, as if everything is back to normal.
The rehabilitation of monsters – or, at least, the lack of accountability for villains – is one of the reasons our country is in its present disarray. The Tory knack for reinvention depends on it, which is why they’ve so far survived overseeing what is, by many measures, the most ruinous time in office of any government in living memory. Let’s not forget what happened to Theresa May, who – after carelessly disposing of the Tories’ parliamentary majority – was condemned to remain in office by her own party, in the hope she’d absorb the political mortar fire otherwise directed at the Conservatives as a whole. When that purpose had been served, May could be safely discarded, with Boris Johnson heralded as the leader of a fresh new government that was innocent of the sins of his predecessor.
You can also see it as George Osborne is interviewed on Channel 4’s flagship political programme in the capacity of witness, rather than an accused in the dock. No single politician is more guilty for the burning skip that British society has become: his ideologically charged austerity is at the root of the longest squeeze in wages of modern times, fuelling the discontent that proved pivotal in the triumph of leave in the 2016 referendum. He tuts now at economic policies recklessly defying market rules, as though it wasn’t under his economic stewardship that Britain’s AAA-rated debt status wasn’t stripped away.
But more consequentially, observe our new de facto prime minister, Jeremy Hunt. One political commentator declared that “listening to Hunt in interviews this morning [was] like reaching calm blue sea after weeks in a force 10 storm”. It is difficult not to conclude that for many self-described moderates, politics is all about vibe, not about substance: a politician’s record matters less than the reassurance offered by their presentation skills. Hunt himself conceded that, as health secretary, he was too slow to boost the NHS workforce: a euphemistic revision of how he ignored severe NHS staff shortages, which left us underprepared for the pandemic. Given he agitated for corporation tax to be slashed to an even lower level than Truss had dreamed of, how can he credibly argue he will offer a meaningful alternative to Trussonomics? His new “economic advisory council” is comprised of fund managers and bankers – two of the few
groups in society who can claim to have profited from the last dismal few years.
This is a man ideologically committed to austerity, who, in 2019, praised “the genius of David Cameron and George Osborne” for how they “persuaded the country to accept the most challenging cuts to public spending in our peacetime history without poll tax riots”. This is why he will have no compunction in imposing another round of cuts, which will strangle growth and excacerbate the cost of living crisis.
Then there’s Rishi Sunak, now widely presented as a vindicated prophet because of his early opposition to Trussonomics. Observing that a driver loudly intending to accelerate a car over a cliff will result in carnage does not make you a soothsayer. This is a man who boasted about raiding money from poor urban communities in favour of rich Tory districts, who called for those who “vilify” the UK to be treated as extremists, the sort of unhinged authoritarianism you might expect from Viktor Orbán. As chancellor, he successfully championed lockdown sceptics and ensured that restrictions were delayed in autumn 2020, only for them to be imposed more harshly and for longer than might have otherwise been the case when infections spiralled out of control. Sunak isn’t a grownup in the room; he’s another of the establishment’s guilty men.
Penny Mordaunt and Ben Wallace – the two others now touted as prime ministerial successors – may be presented as “cleanskins”, but they too backed the slash-and-burn economics that has left Britain poorer in the midst of a productivity crisis, with creaking infrastructure and flailing public services. And this is why we can’t let Truss be painted as some kind of anomaly or abomination. This was no spasm, no ideological flight of fancy, but the logical endpoint of 12 calumnious years. This was a team effort, brought to you by Conservative party productions, by Cameroons and Eurosceptics, by Spartans and Johnsonites, from One Nation Conservatives to the European Research Group. To coin a phrase, they were all in this together. And there is no hope until all of them – every single one – are removed from office, and the Tory party is rendered unelectable for a generation to come.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist