The best barometer for how well Liz Truss is doing as prime minister will be how closely her cabinet sticks to the script. When the going gets tough in the coming months, will her ministers back her? Or will the most ambitious start to find reasons to stray outside of their brief, or make crowd-pleasing interventions? Such moves would not only suggest that discipline is slacking, but that her one-time leadership rivals believe there could soon be another vacancy at No 10.
As the new prime minister faces a daunting intray and weaker parliamentary support than her predecessors, her hope is that loyalty will triumph. Truss believes that as a minister she has been loyal to not one but three prime ministers – and it is now time for her ministers to do the same in return.
This is the foundation on which her government has been formed. Most of the plum jobs have gone to those who backed her early on in the race, leadership rivals who rowed in behind her after being knocked out and Rishi Sunak backers who saw the error of their ways and switched. Only one MP who backed and stuck with her rival, Sunak, will attend cabinet: Michael Ellis, the new attorney general.
The most senior roles in her government have gone to long-term allies. Her deputy – and health secretary – is her constituency neighbour and closest political ally, Thérèse Coffey. Her chancellor is her Greenwich neighbour and longtime friend Kwasi Kwarteng. Her foreign secretary, James Cleverly, was her deputy when she held the role – so he knows what she thinks. Her home secretary is Suella Braverman, whose endorsement of Truss in the parliamentary stages of the contest was viewed as key to getting her the MP nominations that took her to the final two.
The appointments also hint at Truss’s policy intentions. Like Truss, Kwarteng is more relaxed about debt than his Treasury predecessor, Sunak – meaning they ought to avoid the No 10/No 11 friction that characterised Boris Johnson’s premiership.
A free trade advocate, Truss promoted her longtime supporter Ranil Jayawardena to environment secretary to avoid the inter-departmental fights over trade deals that she had to endure when she was in the trade brief. During that period she viewed then environment secretary, George Eustice, along with Michael Gove, as part of an axis of evil for their supposed protectionism. Both have been banished to the backbenches.
Yet for MPs looking on, many can’t quite shake the feeling that blind support is the most important asset if you want to get on. “It’s incredibly narrow,” complains an MP on the one-nation wing of the party. The fact that Truss’s margin of victory was smaller than the polls had suggested led some Sunak backers to hope she would reach out and try to be a unifier. This clearly has not come to pass.
The prime minister’s camp is unapologetic. “We shouldn’t be held to a ridiculous standard that no other prime minister would be when it comes to appointing people who have been openly hostile,” a member of her leadership campaign tells me.
Her supporters say that the fact that she has even brought her leadership rivals into government ought to be taken as a sign of her magnanimity. However, those openings can’t exactly be described as generous. The grassroots’ favourite, Kemi Badenoch – who refrained from endorsing Truss – has been moved to international trade, meaning she will spend plenty of time out of the country. Penny Mordaunt – who endorsed Truss at one of the early hustings – has been made leader of the House of Commons, which is hardly a starring role.
When it comes to the junior ministerial ranks, there has at least been more of an attempt to suggest that there is a way back for those who supported her rival. A number of Sunak backers – including Mark Spencer, Victoria Prentis and Robert Jenrick – have been brought back into the fold. However, for many MPs it’s all a little too late. “It’s supposed to be a new dawn, but it feels like the middle of the night,” complains one Tory MP left on the sidelines. “We’ve been left in political Siberia when she’ll need our support in the end.”
But there’s another problem lurking here. This isn’t just a story about MPs who want to serve but have been given the cold shoulder; it’s about the fact that several don’t even want to do that.
A number of “red wall” MPs are now so concerned about keeping hold of their seats in the face of Labour leading in the polls that they don’t want any promotion that could distract them from the task at hand: remaining an MP come the next election. Many are exhausted and can barely hide their lack of enthusiasm; a handful of MPs are beginning to look at the prospect of opposition with misty eyes. “The party needs time to rejuvenate,” says one MP, in a safe seat.
The problem with this type of argument, however, is that it tends to be made only by those with large majorities, to the dismay of those MPs in marginal seats, who don’t have the luxury to think about time rebuilding in shadow briefs.
It’s why supporters of Truss hope that the prospect of a looming general election will concentrate minds. But the danger for her is that bad polling and deepening economic woes could make her cabinet start to think not about a general election, but the one that would follow a Tory defeat – the next leadership election. For this reason, public opinion is ultimately what matters. Forget loyalty: it’s good numbers that will offer Truss the best protection against troublesome colleagues.
Katy Balls is the Spectator’s deputy political editor
