She will enter No 10, despite being the less favoured by the general public of two candidates, both of whom leave it cold. But her small party loves her, sending her ratings up with each interminable hustings, as she throws them reckless new pledges and evidence-free policies. What do they see in her that still escapes most voters?
Let’s look into the mind of an ardent Trussite. He was picked out for me by Prof Tim Bale, the great expert on the inner life of political parties. No one is ever typical, but he (who preferred anonymity) fits the broad profile of those 160,000 Tory members, being a southerner in later middle age. He’s a senior member of Liz Truss’s grassroots campaign team, closely plugged into the party he has served for decades.
He dismisses Sunak as “a sleek PR product”. But, as an old hand at elections, doesn’t he worry that Truss’s economic stance is rebarbative to ordinary voters? When polls show people want more windfalls on profiteering utilities, subsidies for unpayable bills and a rescue for the NHS, her tax cutting and state shrinking looks out of kilter with the times. Her low offer sounds out of touch with half the population crippled by energy prices. “People will always want a handout,” he says. “But they don’t want to pay for it. She will stand firm to her principles.”
Here’s what’s fascinating about him. The party of pragmatism and successful pursuit of power has turned ideological. That’s what he admires in her. “No more of the Cameron-Blair, focus-group-and-marketing approach to politics,” he says. Instead, “People want a clear red-blue choice. Look, I’ve nothing in common with Corbyn, but people saw something in him, inspiring new people.” He’s even an admirer of Tony Benn, “a leftwing libertarian”. Ideas and passions are what matter, and that’s the fire he sees in Truss.
“You wait and see,” he goes on. “She’ll become an outstanding leader, she’ll flower and bloom in office. Remember Margaret Thatcher wasn’t popular at first.” He wants politicians who “don’t shift their own policies, but shift public opinion”, recalling how the free market theories of Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman swept Thatcher along on her own trajectory.
Truss will step into a tornado of crises, strikes and severe shortages armed only with tax cuts that favour the well-off, so most commentators expect her to pivot towards the public. “I hope not!” he answers sharply. But what if her policies aren’t deliverable? “Properly targeted tax cuts will inject energy into the economy.” He wants privatised utilities to work better, but adds: “We believe in free markets.”
Insiders, the Financial Times reports, plan for her to fix the crisis in her first 100 days. Her second phase, after Christmas, will deliver her “longer-term agenda for reform” when she will “strip away the crap”. Now, there’s a plan unlikely to survive first contact with reality. As for the “crap”, the unstoppable sewage outflows and the failed Tory privatisations hated even by Tory voters, her every speech suggests a cluelessness about the gigantic omnicrisis ready to swamp her.
Our Trussite expects her to offer some more help, but pins his hopes on the economy coming good in time for the next election. But here’s the crunch: he wants no policy U-turn. “I’d rather take the risk and fight in clear blue water. I’d rather lose the election than see us become John Major again, in office but not in power.” He wants politicians of “principle and purity”, not “the lowest common denominator machine”.
Not win? Really? I never heard Corbynites prefer to lose; they thought they had the better way to win. Our Trussite sounds like Militants, back in the early 1980s, as they chopped the air and held votes at 2am in my local Lambeth Labour party. The end is surely nigh when a party is so infected with zealotry that it puts ideology above winning. But he thinks Trussite conviction will overcome.
Now he may not be typical, but everything about him suggests authentic shire Torydom. He is a man sincere in his beliefs, a longstanding councillor, local leader, not a maverick. Bale picked him out for his decades of keeping his finger on the party’s pulse. Labourites may think all Tories “lower than vermin”, as Aneurin Bevan once put it, but he has a vision, a free-market new Jerusalem whose hazy shores we on the left can’t begin to imagine. He may see more of a shining path than many cautious Labour figures tiptoeing across a tightrope towards the election.
But if that’s the Tories’ path, it’s a will-o’-the-wisp beckoning them to the precipice. The lady will not be for turning if she really does choose ministers to lash her to the mast: the likes of Kwarteng, Rees-Mogg, Braverman, Duncan Smith and even Redwood, one of John Major’s old “bastards”.
To see the how far the Tory party has lost its mind, just breathe in the hallucinations of the Telegraph, the Mail and the Spectator. Their wild anti-wokery and bizarre obsession with re-fighting the lockdown are planets away from everyday lives facing the chill winter of Liz Truss’s first 100 days. Faith sustains her: only believe in Britain and recession will vanish. Tinker Bell economics will save the day if we only clap loud enough to keep the fairytale alive. Labour has been there before, and many will recognise that familiar and terminal disease.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
