Liz Truss enters Downing Street tomorrow to face an economic emergency that is unprecedented in peacetime. She will meet it, we are told, with £100bn of public money, significantly more than what her predecessor, Boris Johnson, spent on furlough during the Covid crisis. This will require a blatant U-turn for a prime minister who spent the summer campaigning for office on a pledge of no more such “handouts”. Yet brute necessity will be Truss’s handmaid. Energy consumers, producers and retailers are screaming in agony. Thousands of small businesses face bankruptcy. After 12 years of Tory government, Truss will be forced to summon Labour’s state interventionism to her rescue.
On any showing, this task will need superhuman powers of leadership. As it is, Truss brings to office no mandate from any national electorate. She was chosen neither by her fellow MPs nor by Tory voters, who variously preferred her rival, Rishi Sunak, or for Johnson to stay in office. In the end, her supporters numbered 81,326 among the Tory party membership, a group which is majority elderly, well off and living in the south-east of England. She has come through an attenuated leadership campaign with little credit to her name beyond stamina. She has been gauche and lightweight in debate. Her policies have seemed implausible, stitched together with cliches.
