The real problem with the Tories? They are still so hung up on Maggie
THERE is a part of me that feels rather sorry for Liz Truss. Not in the sense that she’s being unfairly criticised for her mistakes – on that front I have zero sympathy for her. She wanted this job, she knew what she was taking on, she made all those silly promises and stupid decisions, she refused to listen to anyone sensible, she surrounded herself with third-raters and she threw Kwasi Kwarteng under a bus for implementing her own policies.
These are all her failings, and she must bear responsibility for them. No ifs, no buts, no excuses.
No, the reason I feel sorry for her is that she’s trying to lead a political party that is in such an advanced state of neurosis it’s become totally dysfunctional. It’s not a new leader the Tories need but a shrink.
We’re not just looking at a few sessions of CBT – we’re talking certifiable. If the party were a person it would be Britney Spears shaving her head, or Michael Jackson dangling his baby over a balcony.
This is a proper meltdown we’re witnessing here and Truss, with her limited emotional intelligence, robotic responses and incapacity for empathy, is the last person equipped to deal with it. In fact, if anything, she needs to protect her own mental health. As one MP friend said to me, someone should put a blanket around her, give her a mug of cocoa and gently walk her out the back door of No10.
The truth is, were the party in any way sane, Truss would never even have got within striking distance of No10 in the first place.
HER very appointment is a symptom of its psychosis. Electing her has turned out to be a colossal act of selfharm not seen since the Tories last lost the plot in the early 2000s, and decided Iain Duncan Smith was the answer to all their problems.
At least then, though, they were in opposition, so there was a limit to the damage they could do to themselves – and, more importantly, to the country. This time it’s much, much worse.
An even bigger act of self-harm, of course, was getting rid of Boris Johnson in the first place.
He had his flaws, as we all do, and his blind spots – and Partygate was a total and utter shambles. But he nevertheless had a proper mandate and the kind of majority that is vanishingly rare in modern politics.
The fact that senior Conservatives allowed what effectively amounts to a series of orchestrated Left-wing campaigns and Twitter pile-ons to defenestrate a man who had not only delivered Brexit against the odds (again, not perfectly, but as best as he could after the mess made by May) but also pioneered a response to the pandemic which ultimately allowed the UK to break free of the tyranny of lockdown ahead of pretty much any other country, just goes to show how mad they’ve become.
Any normal group of people would have rallied around him, fought his corner, argued his case – not necessarily for the sake of Johnson himself but for the sake of the party. Instead, they panicked and booted him out. And now look where they are.
Swapping Johnson for Truss was like trading in a Ferrari for a Fiat Punto. Even now the recycling bins in Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington constituency are overflowing with empty champagne bottles, and who can blame them?
So how did we get here? Well, in purely Freudian terms, much of the party’s psychosis can be blamed on a woman. In Johnson’s case, quite literally, but that’s not what I mean. It’s more complex than one man’s priapism. The real problem the Tories have is that they’ve never really got over Margaret Thatcher.
The party’s relationship with Thatcher was very complex. She was both mother figure and object of desire. She disciplined and indulged her members and Ministers in equal measure. What was it Mitterrand said of her? The eyes of Caligula, the mouth of Marilyn Monroe? Spot on. She was mother and lover, a heady, complex mix.
And she delivered. Under Thatcher the Conservative Party became everything it had ever dreamt of being. One-nation Conservatism became a reality and the very fabric of Britain changed. She was strong, resilient, defiant, magnificent. And even though she left office in 1990 (she too, like Johnson, driven out by her own Cabinet), the party’s love for her and all she stood for has never waned.
Indeed, if anything the myth has continued to grow. Ever since her death in 2013, her standing has only increased, helped perhaps by a certain selective amnesia. She now stands somewhere between saint and goddess in the minds of many, and not just MPs.
There are plenty who crave her steely-eyed determination and unshakable vision, who long for a return to those glory days.
AND this is a problem. Not just because living in the past is never very healthy, and in any case her methods wouldn’t survive ten minutes in the current climate of ultra-transparency and 24-hour media scrutiny. But because her ghost haunts the soul of the party, and prevents it from truly moving on.
Brilliant as Thatcher was, the party can’t just continue to behave like some dreadful pub bore, endlessly re-telling the same old stories and weeping into its cups about past triumphs. Moving on isn’t just healthy, it’s a matter of survival.
This twisted Oedipal complex, for example, is the reason the party ended up with Theresa May. It’s the reason they ended up with Truss. MPs and members made the mistake of thinking that just because they were both women, just because they both had something of that gimlet stare about them, that they were somehow political reincarnations of the Baroness.
But they were not, and they are not. As individual politicians, neither is by any means without talent. But as Thatchers 2:0 they are pale imitations, half-sketched onedimensional caricatures, about as true to the spirit of the original as Netflix’s The Crown is to the real Royal Family.
That is why I feel sorry for Truss. Because for all her cock-ups and unforced errors, her real failing in the eyes of the party now turning on her is that she has failed to fulfil their fantasies of resurrecting the Iron Lady. That is why she cannot and will not succeed: she’s not her.
There is nothing wrong with revering great figures from the past. But it’s one thing to honour their memory and respect their deeds, and quite another to turn them into a self-destructive Freudian obsession.
There will never be another Thatcher, just as there will never be another Winston Churchill. There may be parallels, of course, and echoes here and there.
But the future of the party lies elsewhere and success, if it comes, will be found in a wholly different style of leadership, one hung up not on the triumphs of the past, but in the potential of a new generation.
Assuming it survives that long.
ITV’s new media wellness brand Woo is so keen to get the Gen Z’ers on board they have hired a memes director-at-large.
Woo, which caters to those born around 2000, gushes about ‘power of memes’ as an antidote to the news cycle and even says memes can function as a form of self-care.
Alongside memes, Woo – which is funded by ITV-backed Studio 55 – boasts a range of content, from scientific wellness studies to an article exploring evidence that the Loch Ness monster actually exists.