Thunderstorms across the capital last night seemed to be a fitting omen after a day in which a plainly delighted Liz Truss marked her ascent to the helm of party and country. A swift drinks event for supporters was followed by preparations to fly to Balmoral to be formally approved by the Queen. What happens in the next few days may determine the outcome of Truss’s skyrocket career.
Already, she is beset by critics who think she is either going to govern in the manner of a Thatcherite velociraptor, slashing the state, or sell out her supporters by tacking back to the mushy middle. In interviews about the figure I first encountered as a hyper-ambitious ministerial newbie in the Department for Environment, in the thick of deadening rows about badger culls and falling bee numbers and trying to interest me later in her “cheese wars” for more home production, I’m asked if she is a sly opportunist who has cynically plotted her way to the helm or “not very bright”, oddly for an Oxford graduate state-school product who helped run a proper think-tank.
Truss’s leadership will be a high-wire act because that is the way she is built. And she may well fail quickly if she cannot put a confident stamp on a mood of national crisis or too many economic risks push her into the death zone of currency crises and investor flight. Yet it cannot be that all the slighting things said about her at once are true, because so many of them are contradictory. She courted a reputation with some giddy socialising to build backbench support. But even officials who don’t warm to her solutions describe an “organised” person, which will come as some relief in Number 10 after the cyclonic Boris years.
What is certain is the new Truss era will be very unlike much that has gone before. For one thing, it will have to be because the spending numbers being envisaged are vast to stave off a winter crisis, starting with relief from the real fear people feel at the prospect of not being able to heat their homes or eat properly. Offsetting wide national anxiety is her first challenge. So expect a package sizeable enough to score a political point in outdoing Labour’s £29 billion commitment.
This is paradoxical but not wrong — the country needs help, urgently, and the state is the lender of last resort, including to its own citizens. As she won’t raise taxes, she has to take on more debt as well as cut some sensitive public spending to offset fears that her sums are dangerously fuzzy. Really, this is the economics of SEP (Someone Else’s Problem): figuring out the repayment happens long after the politician who took out the “loan” has left office). A repayment horizon of, say, 20 years would not much bother older, Conservative-leaning voters.
Yesterday, Truss promised to “deliver, deliver, deliver”. The nagging question is — deliver what? The goals and implementation record of the present government had become so decoupled and its key aims vague, even to supporters, let alone the swing voters who will determine whether Truss or Keir Starmer prevails in 2024.
Her Cabinet will also have a very different vibe to the fractious and changeable team around Johnson. Truss is a “Bremain” hybrid (Remain in 2016, then at the forefront of the quest for post-Brexit trade deals ever since). My sense in past conversations is that she cares less about the B word than finding consanguine views of what motivates the economy — and thus powers the UK in a competitive world.
So Kwasi Kwarteng will be chancellor, based on commonality of interests, outlook and pugnacious style. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a likely business secretary. James Cleverly will most likely be foreign secretary (the first polytechnic graduate to hold the Foreign Office) and the replacement of Priti Patel as home secretary by Suella Braverman reward early backers (they also got longer invitations to her Chevening retreat recently — and wine instead of coffee, a mole reports). She is impatient with the idea of a “balanced” team from the party’s wings. “If the trade-off is between balancing different views and unity, she will take unity right now”, says one of her most supportive MPs. It could, of course, all conclude in tears. But given the fiery new presence and the tempests around us, it certainly won’t end in boredom.
