Liz Truss’s faith in the power of markets will be tested to destruction by a winter of strife
Liz Truss enters Downing Street unencumbered by much expectation of success. Even the party that picked her is full of people whose first choice was someone else. Many of them think it should be the man she is replacing – the one who was discarded as a venal liar and an electoral liability.
Boris Johnson has a stake in Truss’s failure. The worse things get in his absence, the fonder he imagines the nation’s hearts will grow for him. He says he will support the new government “every step of the way” but he says all kinds of things. He once said there were no lockdown parties in Downing Street.
Truss’s authority over her party now has to be negotiated with MPs who think Conservative members chose unwisely, while relying on the loyalty of a faction that thinks there should never have been a contest in the first place.
Polls of non-Tory opinion show little confidence in the new prime minister’s ability to rise to the challenge. Her supporters say she can confound low expectations, citing as proof the fact that she has already outmanoeuvred the people who thought she was a loser. Whatever her deficiencies, she is demonstrably smarter at politics than a lot of her detractors.
The Trussites (Trussians?) say their candidate has the essential quality of effective prime ministers – pragmatism about the means to achieve goals that are set with unyielding conviction.
The creed is summarised by Mark Littlewood, director of the libertarian
Institute for Economic Affairs, and a friend of the new prime minister, as an intuition “that the state has a greater propensity to do harm than good”. Kwasi Kwarteng, the new chancellor, has written that “Liz is committed to a lean state”, while preparing to throw tens of billions of pounds at the problem of soaring energy bills.
That all tallies with my experience of having argued with Truss about politics on a handful of occasions. There is no problem to which she wouldn’t prefer a free-market solution, but she sees voter demand for government protection as a sad fact of political life. She seems to view that appetite with indulgent frustration, as if the coddled public needs its hands gently, but firmly prised from nanny’s skirts.
In that respect, Truss represents an intellectual departure from both of the last two Tory prime ministers. Theresa May came to power promising a government that would busy itself dousing “burning injustice”. She interpreted the Brexit referendum result as an expression of anger by people who
felt “left behind” by the march of globalisation.
Johnson agreed. His levelling-up agenda was conceived as a deployment of state power to repay all the leave voters clustered in former Labour heartlands who had lent the Tories their votes in 2019. Truss takes a different view of that ballot.
In a short victory speech on Monday, she explained how the result of the last election was down to natural alignment of British and traditional Conservative values: “freedom, low taxes, personal responsibility”.
In other words, the nation has been crying out for the very things that Truss herself believes to be the foundations of sound government. Armed with that convenient belief, the new prime minister is going to test a proposition that is common among her own MPs but eccentric elsewhere – that the only thing wrong with Conservative governments over the past 12 years is that they haven’t been Conservative enough.
It is a habit of mind that radical Tories share with revolutionary communists, who can always excuse the slide of Marxist regimes into bankrupt tyranny with the claim that the theory wasn’t properly applied or its correct operation is thwarted by unbelievers and malign foreign states.
Truss is supported by Brexit Bolsheviks who are convinced that their revolution is at constant risk of sabotage by unrepentant remainers in Whitehall. The prime minister’s own analysis of Britain’s economic malaise relies on the idiosyncratic view that policy has been focused too narrowly through a “lens of redistribution” and is not interested enough in growth. Apparently, the obstacle to an enterprise boom has been a picket-line of socialist chancellors who were only pretending to be Tories.
Paradoxically, the Trussonomic remedy to stagnation requires an attitude to public debt that has more in common with the Labour left than the fiscally conservative right (although the two sides propose different targets for their borrowed munificence).
The new government’s political strategy appears to be pumping money into the system to induce a sugar rush of growth before too many households and businesses are ruined by inflation and rising interest rates. When Keir Starmer complains, Truss will accuse him of deficient patriotism – talking the country down instead of helping lift it up. She can pilfer bits of Labour policy that look popular.
The plan involves riding out a winter of industrial strife as public sector wages stay frozen, and weathering voter fury as basic services stop functioning. It also relies on financial markets not deciding that the whole thing is bananas and junking Britain’s currency and its debt.
Could it work? Truss has been underestimated before. It’s a long shot, but swing voters might be more inclined to give the benefit of doubt to an unfamiliar new prime minister than Westminster malcontents whose contempt has been hardened by familiarity. A dogged sense of purpose could feasibly earn an embattled leader grudging respect from people who can see there are no easy options. But the ideological aversion to government intervention will inhibit the prime minister whenever events demand drastic state action, as they will again and again.
The people who are certain that Truss is the right choice to steer Britain through the coming storm base that view on the one opinion she has that is least appropriate to the task at hand. Her special quality is supposed to be pragmatism in pursuit of conviction, but those two things now pull in opposite directions. It is a formula for government that lurches all over the place, then comes apart at the seams.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist