WELL, that went well. Veteran broadcaster Bernard Ponsonby described it as “the poorest conference speech I’ve ever heard from a prime minister” – and that’s up against some pretty tough competition.
At the Tory party conference in 2017, Theresa May’s breathing apparatus gave out on her during her big platform speech and parts of the scenery peeled off mid-address, turning the slogan “building a country that works for everyone” – remember that? – into a live-action game of guess-what-we-really-meant-by “bui ding a c ntry tha orks or ryon”. Make Mordor great again!
But for Bernard, May unable-to-speak is still more eloquent than “monotone, leaden” Truss in full flow – if you can describe the angular syntax of the new prime minister as flowing. Not all of this is Liz’s fault. Truss talks with all the humanity of a Gatling gun at the best of times, but as a tribe, modern politicians have come to favour bold declaratory phrases in their platform speeches. Eschewing complete sentences, they knit together a succession of clipped, affirmative, quotable lines.
This has structural advantages. You can read out your string of punchy platitudes without getting tangled in the tenor of a complex sentence or lost about where your emphasis should land. Phrases like, “four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”, would never make the cut in the television age.
But. The consequence. Of this. Is that. The delivery. Often. Becomes. Painfully staccato – as our leaders try to infuse their soaring rhetoric with a persistent sense of political gravity. I ask you: what’s wrong with verbs? The modern speechwriting consensus seems to be that they’re not prime ministerial.
Truss’s conference speech really only had one theme: the “anti-growth coalition”. They say attack is the best form of defence – and heaven knows this PM had enough to feel defensive about as she took to the rostrum with a smile which didn’t reach her eyes and a palpable air of insecurity. So on the attack she went, and the lion’s share of her short address was given over to denouncing the enemies of the free market.
She tells us that “we can see” an “anti-growth coalition at work across the country”. Truss’s list of enemies within is at once extensive – and strikingly incoherent. First, there are the political foes: Labour, the LibDems and the SNP. Fair dos. But she didn’t stop there. A catalogue of people who are making her life difficult quickly followed. There’s “the militant unions, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers and Extinction Rebellion”. Podcasters, broadcasters and people who “taxi from North London townhouses to the BBC studio” to decry critics of “the status quo” are all also part of Liz’s imagined community of naysayers and do-downers.
In its way, the line neatly captures the contradictions of this UK Government. After 12 years in office, aren’t Tories responsible for the status quo? And since we’re reflecting on the state of Britain’s media culture, aren’t most of the “talking heads” in this country firmly on the right of politics, employed by media conglomerates which have consistently promoted just the kind of economic dogma Trussworld subscribes to? The Mail, the Express, The Sun, The Telegraph and Times – just how many supportive newspapers does Truss consider a fair advantage for the Tories to enjoy over their critics? There’s a palpable sense of surprise that these old reliables might finally desert the “natural party of government”.
Keir Starmer, Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon were all named in the indictment too. Starmer for proposing a windfall tax on energy companies and Drakeford for “cancelling road-building projects”. Truss can add the woke Marxist CEO of oil-giant Shell to her anti-growth coalition. Ben van Beurden told a London energy conference last week that European governments may have to introduce fresh taxes on the sector to protect the poorest from energy price volatility, describing the damage it will do to “a significant part of society”.
“You cannot have a market that behaves in such a way,” he said. Sounds like anti-growth agitation to me.
Truss’s complaint about the SNP leader was characteristically strange: “Nicola Sturgeon won’t build new nuclear power stations in Scotland to solve the energy crisis in Scotland”, ignoring the more pressing fact that it is England – not Scotland – which is energy-poor and short of a plan to cover its needs.
Perhaps the most unintentionally comic inclusion in Truss’s list of enemies of the people are “vested interests dressed up as think tanks”. The concept of psychological projection was made for this moment. With narcissists, every allegation is a confession. The sins they see in others are their own frailties. Because no prime minister in recent history is more of an ideologically bought-and-sold creature of London’s shadow world of right-wing think tanks than Liz Truss and her government.
This isn’t even a partisan point. Almost all of the most influential think tanks in the UK push right-wing policies, aiming to shrink the state, cut welfare spending, lower taxes and eliminate regulations. Much of the art of creating a neoliberal think tank to agitate for lower taxes and the privatisation of public goods seems to be in picking a determinedly bland name which the casual listener might mistake for a university research centre.
You’ll have heard these folk on the airwaves – though their ideological bent and agenda are not always made clear. There’s the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Adam Smith Institute – and best named of all, the Taxpayers’ Alliance.
A commitment to right-wing dogma unites all these organisations, as do persistent questions about who funds their endeavours. Last week we found out Truss raised half a million pounds to run her pitch for the Tory leadership. Given her obviously sincere commitment to tackling “vested interests dressed up as think tanks”, she will no doubt be appalled to find out that many of her big-money donors have close ties to a range of these neoliberal outfits.
She’ll also be shocked how many graduates of these organisations she has decided to appoint to her inner circle. There’s Ruth Porter, formerly of the Institute for Economic Affairs, who is her deputy chief of staff. Her political secretary Sophie Jarvis is a former Adam Smith Institute staffer. Truss’s chief economic adviser, Matthew Sinclair, is a former chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Trussworld is lobbyist central.
TRUSS left one group conspicuously out of her “anti-growth” indictment – Tory MPs. Reading between the lines, it isn’t just the new Home Secretary who thinks elements of the parliamentary Conservative Party “staged a coup” and “undermined the authority of our prime minister in an unprofessional way” by forcing their new leader to abandon her plans to cut taxes for the wealthiest people in the UK. The undertone of seething resentment tells you a lot about where Truss’s anger is really directed.
Although her speech is superficially framed as an attack on external opponents, in reality, Truss’s speech is an indictment of her own party’s record in government, denouncing more than a decade of sustained Tory rule. During the 1979 election campaign, Margaret Thatcher famously said: “I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t. We who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free, when otherwise it would be in chains. And look at us now.”
Truss – in deliberate echo of this analysis – repeatedly accused Rishi Sunak of “declinist” thinking during the leadership campaign. She invoked the idea of “our great country in decline” several times in this speech.
It is easy to see the historical parallels Truss hopes to draw, but the sequencing is wrong. When Margaret Thatcher junked the political legacies of her predecessors, it was the beginning of a new period of Tory domination – not at the end of a long period in charge. The idea you can trash your own domestic record, and imagine voters will thank you for your candour, is psychedelic thinking. Iron Lady cosplay can’t turn 2022 into 1979.
