In the wake of the self-devouring carnival of cannibals, the most disastrous Conservative conference anyone can remember, parliament will reconvene this week. Then the dark fun and gory games will really begin.
On paper, Liz Truss commands a hefty Commons majority of 71. In practice, she is a prime minister with a majority of less than zero. We have what is effectively a hung parliament in which the Truss faction is not even the largest party. The good news is that she simply does not have the numbers to implement her crazier notions. The bad news is that we will endure a period of numerous emergencies with a dysfunctional government struggling to do much at all.
She and her chancellor did not abandon their attempt to abolish the top rate of tax because there was some kind of “coup”, the ridiculous assertion of Suella Braverman. They were forced into that tyre-smoking U-turn because giving more to those who already have much in the middle of a cost of living crisis was hated by the public and was not going to get through parliament.
That reverse soothed financial markets a little and headed off a revolt by Tory MPs, but it has also made the position of the prime minister and her chancellor even feebler. Those Tories who braved the airwaves to argue for the abolition of the top rate feel extremely stupid. Even the residual loyalists will be much less inclined to act as human shields for Downing Street’s ill-starred couple in future. As one former Tory chief whip puts it: “No one wants to make an arse of themselves defending things if the government is then going to U-turn.”
Having tasted the blood of the prime minister and chancellor, the rebels have now started to organise against an attempt by the Treasury to make real-terms cuts to welfare. We have reached a surreal stage of the implosion of the Tory party when Nadine Dorries feels qualified to attack “cruel” cuts and lambast Ms Truss for “lurching to the right”.
Even before a conference of internecine conflict, there was a fundamental fragility to the Tory leader’s position. This is down to the dicey way in which she acquired the premiership and her calamitous conduct in the office. Never forget that she attracted just 50 votes in the first leadership ballot, which means that 305 Tory MPs thought someone else would do a better job, a judgment that has since been rewarded with ample vindication. She didn’t get into the last two until the final round and then had the backing of fewer than a third of her colleagues.
In this context, Ms Truss would have been sensible to operate with delicacy towards Conservative MPs and be cautious about what she attempted to put through parliament while acknowledging that the country had no say in her elevation. She has instead behaved in a manner that suggests she was blithely heedless or arrogantly careless of her lack of support. She has acted as if she has the thumping endorsement at a general election for her libertarian manifesto when she was actually installed by Tory activists against the wishes of most of her MPs and without any mandate from the public.
There are two potential sources of salvation for a prime minister in such a precarious parliamentary position. One is to be popular. Most Tory MPs never much trusted Ms Truss’s predecessor, but they indulged him for a very long time because they thought he knew how to harvest votes. Only when it was incontrovertible that he had become toxic with the electorate did they act to remove him. The public were never keen on being hitched to Ms Truss and are already clamouring for a divorce. Never in the field of British politics has a leader become so staggeringly unpopular in such a spectacularly short time. Her approval ratings have plunged below those of Theresa May just before she was forced to resign and below those of Boris Johnson just before he was ejected from Downing Street. He became slow-poisoning electoral arsenic for the Tories; she is instant electoral cyanide.
The other possible remedy for a leader in a fragile position is to form a government that embraces representatives of other factions. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, both vastly stronger prime ministers, took care to include all of their respective party’s significant traditions in their governments. Lady Thatcher had one nation Tories, such as Willie Whitelaw and Ken Clarke, around the top table. Sir Tony’s cabinets included John Prescott as his deputy and other non-New Labourish figures.
Instead of assembling a broad church cabinet, Ms Truss is high priestess of a narrow sect. She purged almost everyone who had not been on her team, especially anyone associated with Rishi Sunak, the more popular choice among Conservative MPs. She packed the cabinet with close friends, ideological soulmates, hard rightists to whom she owed campaign debts and some Johnsonites to try to keep them onside. “I used to say Boris’s cabinet was the worst since world war two,” says one senior Tory. “Hers is even worse.”
After all the unforced blunders of the past fortnight, what support she did have among Tory MPs is draining away. “My guess is that she’s already lost half of those who voted for her in the final round,” says one former Tory cabinet minister. “So, at best, she’s only got the support of a sixth of the parliamentary party.”
Even her karaoke cabinet cannot sing in tune. Though barely a month in post, senior ministers are already fighting like scorpions in a bottle. The conference was not a festival of unity around a new leader, but a jamboree of blue-on-blue warfare waged as if there were no leader.
There will be more anarchy when MPs return to Westminster. Since the maxi-disaster of the mini-budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor have been scrambling around for ways to restore their credibility with financial markets. That means trying to make their sums add up. Desperate not to make any more humiliating about-turns on their unfunded tax cuts, they are looking to take the blade to spending. This at a time when public services are grappling with the legacy of the pandemic and the ravaging impact of an inflation rate far higher than was expected when their budgets were set. Substantial sums can only be found by raiding the resources allocated to the four biggest spenders, which are welfare, health, education and defence. “There are not many bleeding stumps left to cut off,” says one senior Tory on the right of his party. “I’m not going to vote for a cut to universal credit, I’m not going to vote for a cut to the NHS, I’m not going to vote for a cut to education, I’m not going to vote for a cut to defence.”
The Truss regime says it has a pro-growth agenda. So it would be madness to take the axe to infrastructure improvements and other capital projects. That would fuel more rage among Conservative MPs, especially those who represent less prosperous areas and have been telling their voters the Tories were sincere about levelling up. Growth could be given a helping hand by negotiating a better trading relationship with the huge market on Britain’s doorstep. That wouldn’t cost anything, but it is a no-go for a cabinet of hard Brexiters headed by a zealous convert.
A lot of Tory MPs stayed away from Birmingham. Some of those who did attend could be heard pondering the fate of the Canadian Conservatives in 1993, when they suffered an election meltdown so epic that they went from being a majority administration to a party with just two members of parliament.
I know of ministers who attended conference business receptions not to promote the government, but to pick up contacts in expectation that they won’t have a job as an MP after the next election.
There is already a lot of chatter about removing Ms Truss and the scheming will become more feverish when they all get back to Westminster. There’s no consensus about how her defenestration might be engineered or who would take her place or how on earth they’d contrive this without making the Tory party look even more demented. So, at the time of writing, she remains at Number 10, a leader without a majority who makes things even worse for herself by behaving as if the country awarded her a landslide, still in office, but power gurgling away, her brief premiership already circling the plughole.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
