Liz Truss re-enters the fray
The former prime minister is back for another stab.
Having served the shortest term of any prime minister in British history after sending mortgage rates soaring to 6.5%, bringing pension funds to “within hours of collapse”, and dragging her party to a record low of 14% in the polls, you would think Liz Truss might “concede” and “move on”, says Paul Goodman on Conservative Home. Instead, in a 4,000-word essay for The Sunday Telegraph, Truss “digs in and reimagines the past”, all on the basis of her continuing “misapprehension” that she had a “mandate” when she entered Downing Street. Yet her mandate was Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto: Tory Party members did not give her one. Having recklessly chosen to pursue a radical agenda, it’s no use blaming her fall on a “left-wing economic establishment” (“Bond traders? Really?”), or poor communication skills. It was “less about communication than character” and in any case, why become a politician if you can’t communicate?
A low-growth death spiral
Truss’s defence is also that the economy was “extremely delicately balanced, in ways that she did not fully realise”, says The Daily Telegraph. For instance, the Treasury failed to warn her the pensions market was “dangerously overexposed to falling bond prices”. And she acknowledges that she was probably “trying to fatten the pig on market day”, says Katy Balls in The Guardian, accusing the Tory government of long failing to make the “small-state, low-tax, free-market” case. She’s not alone. Many Tory MPs agree that the party has “lost touch with its core principles”.
Her analysis resonates with right-wing Tory MPs and it poses a “threat” to Rishi Sunak, says Chris Giles in the Financial Times. Already weakened by Tory sleaze scandals and facing tough decisions on the Northern Ireland protocol and small boats legislation, Truss has “opened up a new front”. It was already opening, says Ruth Comerford on iNews. More than 50 Tory MPs have joined the Conservative Growth Group set up by Truss’s former cabinet minister, Simon Clarke, which advocates the low-tax, deregulatory approach she favoured. Then there’s the Conservative Democratic Organisation, viewed as a “rebel front supportive of Boris Johnson”; the Northern Research Group, comprising mainly Red Wall Tories “demanding more levelling-up cash”; and the “culture warriors” in the Common Sense Group. Having Boris Johnson “jostling from the sidelines” as well doesn’t help, add Esther Webber and Annabelle Dickson in Politico.
It’s a good thing that the debate among Conservatives about the best way out of Britain’s “low-growth death spiral” has started and, in that sense, Truss’s intervention is “critical” and “essential”, says The Daily Telegraph. The party is “cratering in the polls” and the “freemarketeers must now speak up”. Ideas need to be sold to the public well in advance of the next general election. To “turn the tide on high-tax social democracy” requires a huge amount of work. “Profound institutional reforms”, including to the Office for Budget Responsibility and civil service, need to be “planned extremely carefully”. Good personnel are “scarce” and a “vast and talented team” needs to be recruited. For now, Sunak’s relative inaction is understandable, says Rafael Behr in The Guardian. Truss’s “fiscal misadventures, on top of Johnson’s bombast and general Brexit turbulence, cost Britain its market premium as a serious, reliable country when bidding for foreign investment”. To restore its status “leads to a trap”. Caution signals stability, but “at the expense of bold decisions that might get the economy moving again”. No wonder chancellor Jeremy Hunt, for “fear of spooking markets”, does little but “tinker at the margins of a stagnant status quo”.