‘Liz Truss is talking about tax cuts,” Beth Rigby said to an exquisitely uncomfortable-looking Rishi Sunak, in an interview on Sky at the Conservative party conference on Tuesday. “The party still loves her, it seems more than they love you. Does that sting?” “Oh, gosh,” Sunak replied, having skipped those rudimentary baby steps that Thatcher managed so long ago: get a voice coach; stop saying “gosh”.
“You have a totally different version of events,” he told Rigby. Well, maybe, but probably not. The day before, it emerged that 60 Conservative MPs had joined Truss’s Growth Group, which argues for lower taxes and, well, you can guess the rest: a smaller state, more fracking and some fairytale castles, sorry, new houses (which that smaller but mysteriously richer state will somehow build). As a rebel army within the Conservative party, the Growth Group, should it mobilise in the autumn, represents the end of Sunak’s parliamentary majority, which – I guess, give or take a bit of handshaking with King Charles – makes Truss prime minister again.
This is, frankly, astonishing to the rest of the country. Truss resigned after 45 days as prime minister, having served certainly the shortest and arguably the most disastrous term in British history. She crashed the stock market, the bond market and the foreign market within a month of taking office, and it would have been 10 days faster than that, had a period of mourning for the Queen not interrupted her plans. I know I speak for many of us when I say my mortgage is now 100% more expensive. Rents are also spiralling – probably only those who own their houses outright are exempt from this head-spinning reality: that we’re permanently poorer, thanks to a prime minister none of us elected, whose personal shortcomings were obvious even before she sprayed them neon and flung them on to the international stage. Her rhetoric is fantastical yet simultaneously mundane, allied to a slender, even nonexistent grasp of reality.
As tempting as it is to ruminate on Truss’s nature – what makes her so immune to shame, so energetically self-promoting – it’s probably a second order issue to the question: what on earth is the Conservative party thinking?
Traditional right-wing commentators dismiss the proposition: this isn’t a comeback, this is the circus of conference, the way they amuse themselves when the main floor is uninspiring and sparsely populated. At other Tory fringe meetings, speakers held views much more aligned with those of the population at large, if delivered in an understated way. Former MP Paul Goodman said of Truss’s prime ministership: “It wasn’t obviously a success, or perhaps somehow it was a success but we didn’t notice it at the time.” Bim Afolami, MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, replied: “I think it’s bananas.”
Tim Bale, political scientist and author of The Conservative Party After Brexit, agrees: “I don’t think there’s any serious prospect of her making a comeback into the leadership, though you might well argue that it would be difficult to keep her out of the shadow cabinet.” Yet he disagrees that she’s burnt her bridges with her own side. “She does still represent this part of the Tory party that believes that tax cutting and spending cutting are the holy grail.”
Political commentator Benedict Spence says: “It’s not so much about her as an individual; she’s a figurehead for an ideology that’s rather difficult to get too excited about in purely ideological terms.” If we were to take that ideology at face value, that would mean there’s a hard core of Conservative voters and MPs who want to cut the amount coming in to government at precisely the point that it has run out of money, and is spending more on servicing its debts than at any time in the past 20 years.
“Self-sabotage” doesn’t begin to cover that; it’s more like a national death wish. But Spence raises this subtle point: that it might not be about economic principles so much as “a martyr complex, the sense that she was outmanoeuvred, and there was so much more to give. This is the same as the idea of Boris Johnson coming back: “If only the woke blob or the media hadn’t arrayed themselves against us, there would have been so much more to give.” And this – don’t kill me for the therapy speak, I’m part of the blob after all – is a psychic defence response to the sense of impotence engendered by the bizarre dynamic between grassroots and parliamentary Tories: members look at the track record, and ask what’s actually been achieved, and ministers, Spence says, “turn around and say: ‘Yes, isn’t it dreadful that nothing’s been done?’” If the government is not a victim of our assorted national disasters but their perpetrator, this whole dialogue falls apart: it thus becomes necessary to defend Truss, along with Johnson, as the crucified martyrs who galvanise the complex.
Why would Conservatives have that sense – after all those years of power, with nothing to show for them – in the first place? Why, indeed: this is a hangover from Brexit, which has left not just a trail of broken promises, but an altered political consciousness. “Johnson is the original celebrity Brexiter,” Bale says, “but people hanging on his coat tails – Jacob Rees-Mogg, Suella Braverman – there is now a route for these people even if they’re blocked within the parliamentary party, through social media, partly through the traditional media.” Of course, there have always been celebrity Tory MPs, but “I don’t think that would have happened before,” Bale continues, “to be able to translate that celebrity into promotion.” This has had a knock-on effect on activism, which “has become fandom”, Bale says, “in so far as it’s all about celebrity rather than achievement or gravitas. If that’s the case, politicians who would in the past have been holed below the waterline can still make it and make it back.”
The influence of social media is visible, not just in Truss’s reception, but in so many of the more bizarre speeches, from Mark Harper waging war on 15-minute cities, to Claire Coutinho, an energy minister, making a speech about Keir Starmer’s fabricated meat tax. There is a phrase on the socials, “audience capture”, where feedback from an audience makes the person creating the content increasingly extreme. The ultimate example is Nikocado Avocado, who started out as a vegan influencer, making very little impact, and then ate a burger as part of a mukbang (where you eat loads of food really fast). The positive feedback was so intense for him that he did more and more of that content until he suffered significant health issues, including broken ribs, as a result of his obesity (He’s fine now. Well, he’s still alive). This is more or less what we’re seeing at the Tory conference: as senior figures get more intense approval from the ether, the more fanciful and a-factual their speeches become, and they rush to gorge themselves on made-up things that Starmer wants to tax.
The traditional right-wing media has its part to play, of course. The Truss conundrum will always be twofold: not just “why do they love her?”; also, “why haven’t they noticed what the rest of us think?” According to Bale: “There’s a yawning gap between how these people are seen in that party bubble and how they’re seen outside. I think that, to some extent, speaks to the power and the influence of the party in the media. Although it’s not hermetically sealed, a lot of Conservatives live in a world or an ecosystem which is dominated by [right-wing] media outlets, and therefore they get their views about what people think from there, rather than lived experience or polling. Rationally, you’d think MPs could read the polling and see that Truss and Braverman are absolutely toxic. They have the reverse Midas touch.”
The polls are so unambiguous on Truss: she left office as the least popular prime minister since YouGov was founded, and her ratings remain dazzlingly low: 69% negative, 11% positive (according to that pollster, but this is replicated across the board). Fame, though, is a different matter: 97% “have heard of” her.
The view from the podium might be a bit more hard-boiled: from Truss’s imaginary fiscal headroom to Kemi Badenoch’s imaginary racial equality to Braverman’s increasingly rabid anti-migrant rhetoric, we could be witnessing the open auditions for leader of the opposition. They might just be so sure, now, that Labour has it in the bag that they’ve ceased to focus on the forthcoming general election at all, and are concentrating only on what comes next.
“It’s a tragic reflection on their own capacities in their current roles, to think: ‘Yup, the game’s up,’” Spence says. But he acknowledges the truth: “Sunak understands what is required to win over the Tory party, and for the Tory party to win over the country. But it’s far too late, and he is not that cavalier sort of person who can riff off the moment. We see how angry he gets in interviews.” We could argue for longer about whether Sunak does understand those things, but there’s this obvious, unsquarable circle: where a Conservative politician does have those devil-may-care instincts that the voters love, it’s because they just haven’t given the matter, or the country, any serious thought. In order to describe a Conservative agenda that appeals to Conservatives, let alone to swing voters, they have to imagine a world other than the permacrisis one we’re living in. Bale says: “I’m not so sure there’s been an absolutely huge ideological shift: the idea that the Conservative party used to be full of moderate liberals is nonsense. It’s been a bog standard Thatcherite party for a long time, and most MPs are bog standard Thatcherites.” The problem is Thatcherism: we can no longer afford it.
The Tory party is the only one that doesn’t release figures about its numbers or composition to the Electoral Commission, but from what researchers do know, it is probably above 100,000 members but not by much, middle-aged to elderly, almost entirely white, normally comfortably off, almost entirely in the south of England. There’s little evidence of Ukip-entryism to sway the agenda; if they’ve changed, it’s of their own accord.
And MPs have changed, in another important regard. “The Conservative party of old used to be all about power,” says Bale. “You’d have had to get them out of Downing Street by their fingernails. They would never have made the mistake that Labour made in 2010 and let the Lib Dems wander off. Now, there are a lot of Conservatives who have gone the way of some Labour purists, and think: ‘A period of opposition could be good, it would allow us to reenergise ourselves, get back to true Conservatism.”
The funny thing is, as I gawp at this spectacle: a political figure who should be a zombie, walking among the rest, more alive, more feted, I realise that I can’t leave Truss alone either. I’m still wondering what her peculiar, empty-yet-loaded speeches really mean, still thinking about where her financial backing comes from, still ruminating on her end days (which were indivisible from her start days), still worrying about what dark mischief she’ll make next. I’ve given her far more thought than I ever have Sunak. In her feckless zeal, her bare assertions, her shamelessness, she just seems to embody the age better than the others.
