Which is the worst U-turn since Liz Truss became prime minister? Sure, you’re going to say the tax cuts for the rich, an absolute by-numbers disaster, from the market crash on the day of the announcement, through days of fresh catastrophe and an absent leader, in flat denial that anything was wrong, to the reversal itself, inelegantly announced (“We get it and we have listened”) to a party and, more importantly, a national economy in disarray. But let me just offer for comparison the lesser-spotted double U-turn: first the Tories were going to make a fuller financial statement on 23 November, then, in a panic, they brought it forward to the end of October, only to push it back to its original date, then, just this week, pulled it forward again. Does U-turn even cover this? Should we be calling it a hokey-cokey?
Clearly, this is a government in unusual straits: it is reaching the point where it wouldn’t even be able to follow through on a sound decision, with its MPs in open rebellion and its polling numbers a galloping disaster. These conditions create ever more tergiversation: opponents have seen the weakness and know that there’s no such thing as a brick wall, only an MDF partition that hasn’t been sledgehammered hard enough, while friends who have been humiliated by defending a position that is later reversed fall silent. But Truss isn’t the first prime minister to U-turn: indeed, every leader will change a position at some time or another.
But is it always a disaster? What is the most detrimental effect: that it makes you seem weak, that it emboldens your enemies, or that it discourages your friends? And if Truss’s are the worst U-turns in modern British politics, what made the others so much less bad, in retrospect, so salvageable?
One former adviser to Boris Johnson gives the view that was quite common in Johnson’s camp, that “whereas the media and Westminster really get inflamed by a U-turn, normal people are more than OK with one. A well-timed U-turn for the right call, clearly, the general public en masse would see it as the right decision.” Tom Baldwin, author and former senior political adviser to Ed Miliband, says: “Contrast Truss’s with Johnson’s U-turns: he made them endlessly, and they reinforced what people thought was his essential brand. He didn’t really stand for anything. He was a cipher for moods and feelings. Truss comes in after Johnson, and says: ‘What we’re going to give you is pure unadulterated class-A Thatcherism – not cut with anything. It’ll knock your head off, this shit. And then she has to backtrack on that. So while Johnson’s U-turns reinforced what people already thought his government stood for, Truss’s have utterly undermined everything she stood for.”
This point is probably best made by comparing two U-turns made by one leader: Gordon Brown. The first time Brown reversed, it had been widely briefed that he would hold a snap election in 2007, then he saw the polling numbers and denied it had ever been the plan. The second time, he (or rather Alistair Darling) wanted to abolish the 10p tax rate in 2008, then abandoned the plan after a backbench rebellion among Labour MPs who thought it would hurt the poorest. That turnaround actually worked fine with his brand. He was a solutions-driven, economically minded man whose pressing concern was social justice; if he changed his mind in pursuit of that: no problem. The election turnaround was a car crash, though. Partly because, as political media adviser Scarlett MccGwire remembers: “Everybody knew that the reason he wasn’t going for an election was because of the polls, and he denied that. He denied that he’d even been planning an election, even though the briefings had gone out. Leaflets had been printed!”
Baldwin agrees: “When you think of his first few months in charge, he was ‘not flash, just Gordon’. A sensible, principled leader. After that, his enemies were able to put him across as a spin-driven, poll-soaked maniac who changed his mind with every sweat-stained shirt.” The tragedy was that Brown would have won that election; he just wouldn’t have won by as many seats as Tony Blair.
Timing matters, both of the manoeuvre itself and the context around it. The former adviser to Johnson insists: “Doing a U-turn well has a very small window. In this case [Truss’s tax U-turn], they waited far too long. The same rule applies with resignations: there’s a window where you can do a really dignified resignation. But if you miss it and resign too late, there’s no dignity in it.”
Baldwin says: “You either do it so gradually that people don’t notice, or you do it quickly.” Truss’s U-turn was uniquely bad: fast enough that the news agenda never moved on, so “everything she did [was] under the microscope, her authority draining away by the moment”, Baldwin says, but slow enough that she had time to give an interview to the BBC’s Nick Robinson promising no U-turn that had yet to air by the time there were ferrets everywhere and the reversal was under way.
But her timing, contextually speaking, could also hardly have been worse. In 2015 George Osborne made a huge about-turn on his proposed cuts to tax credits, which were slated to deliver a full third of the welfare reduction he’d promised in the Tory manifesto, but there was such a lag, with so much going on – the manifesto, the election, the surprise victory – that most people probably wouldn’t even remember that now. He also had an unexpected £27bn windfall from low interest rates, which is of course (hollow laugh) the exact opposite of Truss’s situation.
Some leaders are like the Men in Black, and when they U-turn you immediately forget the policy, the backlash, the reversal, the lot. Blair actually did row back on a few things, both on the precipice of the policy (he had a silly idea to march delinquents to a cashpoint for an instant fine of the £100 that they definitely wouldn’t have, which he let go of, and he also rolled over on ID cards), and over the longer term, with his crime agenda. His antisocial behaviour orders were, at their height, simply catapulting children into the criminal justice system – at one point, there were 3,500 under 18s in prison, for mainly stupid offences such as spitting. After sustained campaigning, from the Howard League and similar, those numbers dropped from 2005; it was a reversal by stealth, or to put it another way, a government seeing the effects of its actions and reconsidering. Overall it was win-win, since Labour had established itself as tough on crime while simultaneously role-modelling that it could, at a push, see reason. Blair was rarely forced into reversals-on-a-sixpence, because he wasn’t a last-minute merchant. MccGwire remembers: “Before the 97 election, all the things he knew he had to promise, like the minimum wage, like Scottish devolution: he’d stress-tested it all. He’d sat round a table and said: ‘Where are the weaknesses?’ It wasn’t because he was decisive, or that he stuck to his guns. The reason was that he’d done the work beforehand, and he was always very aware of how his MPs and the rightwing press felt.” Arguably, he got so good at herding cats that he lost sight of the fact that maybe the cats were running away for a reason. “We remember Blair now,” Baldwin says, “for not making U-turns even when we wanted him to, like on Iraq”.
Theresa May was all numbers and no wet brain when she devised her social care policy ahead of the 2017 election. She was therefore completely blindsided by the highly emotive issue it became, once it was reframed a “dementia tax” – a horrible roulette where innocent people had to sell their houses to fund their descent into Alzheimer’s. Her famous U-turn on this was absolutely painful to watch, as she stood there insisting “Nothing has changed”, gurning her way through this word salad of a clearly changed policy. But it wasn’t so much her awkwardness as her anger in this announcement that made it so dangerous for her. She seemed to have lost her cool, and keeping calm and carrying on was very much part of her vibe. Where previously the plotting against her had been limited to a pro-Brexit hardcore in her own party, there was a contagion after this to more of the Tory party and more of the public.
And on Brexit: so many people reversed their position, Conservatives especially becoming fierce leavers despite having originally campaigned for remain (including Liz Truss and Theresa May), but it’s one of those things we politely decline to notice, Leave being now considered the gravity position, so to arrive late to it is merely coming to your senses. Exactly the same thing will happen when the world realises we should restore relations with our nearest huge trading bloc, if we ever want a return to prosperity. You won’t be able to find a person in the street, let alone in parliament, who ever thought Brexit was a good idea.
Opposition figures are in the enviable position that they don’t have to reverse anything, since the world isn’t watching them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t change their stance. “Gordon Brown,” says Neal Lawson, a director of Compass, previously a Brown adviser, “was incredibly protective of his intellectual ability and judgment. The big thing that he never wanted to be exposed on Black Wednesday, when we crashed out of the ERM and he was shadowing Norman Lamont, is that his policy was exactly the same as the government’s. He went out there saying: ‘This is terrible’, just crossing his fingers that no one would notice.”
Leaders get a huge amount of leeway if they have explained the long game beforehand, and their U-turn makes sense within it. So Cameron and Osborne had pitch-rolled for ages on the need to fix the public finances ahead of the 2012 budget. Much of that was mendacious, incidentally, since they were flogging the programme as back-office economies, the political equivalent of putting on a jumper and finding money down the back of your sofa, whereas in fact they were bringing local government to its knees and reducing benefits claimants to penury. Nonetheless, people understood the agenda and some even trusted it. The move to redefine “hot food” for VAT purposes, the so-called “pasty tax”, sparked a huge backlash, from Greggs and everyone who likes Greggs – a vast section of the population, almost as many as now say they’ll vote Labour – and they reversed it. But this worked in their favour, reinforcing their presentation of the economic programme as little savings here and there, a bit more VAT on a sausage roll, and making them look as though they were listening.
Truss’s terrible start can be divided into the deliberate and the accidental. The ideological stuff, she is doing on purpose. Her and her chancellor’s budget was a “signifier”, MccGwire says: “We’re going to let the rich have their way, and we’re not going to do anything for the poor.” When we try to recast that as ineptitude, it’s because we’re not facing “how ideological she is”, Lawson says, “how much she swallowed Reaganomics, and intended to do them in practice”. However, ideology isn’t the top trump here: it doesn’t tame markets or alter political realities, it can’t deliver her the votes she needs in the Commons or the numbers she needs in the polls, and it can’t change the fact that in empowering her rebels, she has made herself a zombie leader. She can’t move forward on her own agenda, but nor can she cave in to her blue opponents, because they don’t agree with each other, either.
At the centre of all these miscalculations was the faith that Truss could sell herself to the nation as Margaret Thatcher rebooted without understanding who Thatcher actually was politically, or anything about her trajectory. “Thatcher, in her early incarnation,” Baldwin says, “was constantly backing down. She backed down on her early confrontations with the miners; she was actually rather flexible.” She also had that ineffable quality, Katie Perrior, former director of communications for May, says: “Thatcher had quite a good ear to her own party and to the public at large.” When she became the “lady who’s not for turning”, that was her self-fashioning, and it didn’t work out that well for her. “Later on,” Baldwin says, “she was seen as brittle and unchanging, unwavering, unthinking, unlistening”, and it was under those conditions that the poll tax debacle brought her down. “Not making U-turns,” Baldwin concludes, “can be a major problem. It ossifies you and cuts you off.”
It is too late for those subtleties and history lessons now: Truss has become the lady who is for turning but constantly tells you she isn’t, with an approval rating of –47, the least liked prime minister on record. Was it the fact of the U-turns that brought her here, or the damage done that cannot be undone, or the execution, which was more like a 17-point turn on a motorway? Some awful cocktail of all three, which is going to give the nation its worst ever hangover.
