The phones are ringing in leaders’ offices around the world announcing Britain has a new Prime Minister. As is both diplomatic necessity and ornamental tradition, an incoming Downing Street occupant makes a series of calls to the country’s most important allies presenting themselves and getting straight to business Liz Truss broke with recent convention: she called first Ukraine’s frontline leader Volodymyr Zelensky rather than the US President.
This choice captures what Prime Minister Truss wants to be: continuity with Boris Johnson on his one truly successful legacy — British support for Ukraine — but with a bit of oomph. And a willingness to be less clingy and deferential to the United States, given how she wants London to be purposeful and willing to spend on security. This is because she sees herself in a different position to her predecessor when it comes to the US.
Johnson knew he was disdained by Joe Biden, who saw him as a British Trump. Truss has no such complex.
American officials have their eyebrows raised. British diplomats say Truss is “more American than the Americans” — a leader who wants a more aggressive Washington everywhere. White House staffers, however, think she wants more of an America that does not actually exist. That she doesn’t understand that Biden is the President who withdrew from Afghanistan and never wanted confrontation with Russia. A man whose big moves are all long-term structural plays: the huge investment bills such as the game-changing Inflation Reduction Act, whose full benefits will take a decade or more to be felt.
They are worried that Truss wants short-term speeches and isn’t ready to do the hard work. In Biden’s diction — another bullshitter.
That hard work is the economy: if the Prime Minister is serious about distancing Britain from China — her other big position apart from Ukraine — and raising UK defence spending to three per cent of GDP in the future it will require Downing Street getting to grips with the levers of the British state. What Truss needs to start doing is the hard economic work to remove the country from certain vulnerable Chinese supply lines. The expectation in DC that Truss’s team will actually be able to do that is low to say the least.
What went wrong with Johnson wasn’t declarative rhetoric or singular ambition — few occupants of Downing Street have ever had more — it was the ability to actually get things done. Chaotic, distracted, befuddled, confused, the ex-prime minister struggled to gain control of the levers of state on priorities that could have saved him: from delivering “levelling up” to the thorny issue of making Britain grow. By the end his constant slip-ups on basic management and competence meant his time was up. Truss is seen as in the same mould: an excitable politician, struggling to staff properly. At her worst she barges into things and talks without thinking about what she is saying.
Truss is going to have to prove her critics wrong. But we will not have long to wait. It will become apparent by Christmas whether a Downing Street with a strong chief of staff capable of saying no and saving Truss from her own gaffes has emerged. It will be clear by then whether she has learnt the lesson of Johnson: personal charisma or photo ops are not enough — you actually have to deliver. Only if she achieves this can she flip the current situation where the European Union simply assume she will lose the next election and all thorny matters left unresolved, from Brexit (such as the Northern Ireland protocol) can be resolved with a more amenable future Prime Minister called Keir Starmer.
Taking control, for Truss, will mean stepping back. And empowering officials and carefully selecting a strong team. It will mean trying not to be herself in a lot of ways, but the new prime minister shouldn’t forget her skill for symbolism.
When she next speaks to Biden, whose White House has been unappreciative about the famous Winston Churchill bust lent to his predecessors, she should ask for it back. Then take it with her on her first foreign visit — to Kyiv — to present to Zelensky, who is incarnating his spirit. Never forgetting the war was actually won because the Queen’s first prime minister had an ally in President Franklin D. Roosevelt with an economic plan strong enough to carry us to the finish line.
