Good morning, and a big thank you to the indefatigable members of the Conservative party, who have completed their solemn biannual duty of selecting a new prime minister on behalf of the country while so many others laze about checking the gas meter.
The latest fresh face in Downing Street is one Liz Truss, the former Liberal Democrat, former Remainer, former CND campaigner and former opponent of government handouts who will begin her rotation at the helm of a Conservative pro-Brexit administration by giving her nuclear weapon instructions and setting out a multi-billion pound plan to help with energy bills. “I know that our beliefs resonate with the British people,” she said yesterday. Some of them must.
Boris Johnson will make his last speech as prime minister at 7.30 this morning; then he and Truss travel to Balmoral to see the Queen. (They will be on separate planes, potentially because he wants to pretend to fly his.) Truss then returns to London, where she will address the nation, hoping to avoid the thuddingly obvious symbolism of forecast thunderstorms this afternoon, and begin to set out her agenda for her premiership. The Guardian has every aspect of the day covered; today’s newsletter will run you through some of the key pieces. First, the headlines.
Five big stories
Climate | Environmental destruction in parts of the Amazon is so complete that swathes of the rainforest have reached a tipping point and might never recover, a major study carried out by scientists and Indigenous organisations has found.
Energy | Gas prices surged on Monday and the pound and euro slumped after Russia shut down a big pipeline indefinitely and investors braced for severe shortages.
UK news | Another man has been arrested in connection with the murder of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel, Merseyside police have said. The 34-year-old, the fourth arrested in 24 hours, is being questioned on suspicion of assisting an offender.
Money | More shared “banking hubs” are to be rolled out across the UK to help communities hit by branch and ATM closures to get continued access to cash.
Canada | One of the suspects in the stabbing deaths of 10 people in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan has been found dead, police said, but warned that his accomplice remains at large.
In depth: The promises, the policies, the Maggie-channelling
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The race: a victory that fell short of a coronation
For a candidate viewed as inevitable for weeks, it was an awfully close-run thing. In the parliamentary phase of the vote, just five switched votes would have seen her lose out to Penny Mordaunt; and despite consistent polling showing Truss with overwhelming leads, she beat Sunak by 57% to 43% – the closest outcome since the party started asking its members to decide in 2001. Truss is also the first Conservative to win the leadership without the backing of a majority of her own MPs.
Pippa Crerar’s analysis explains just how difficult these circumstances are, warning that if Truss does not quickly see a polling bounce, “her already restless party will become mutinous”. Her victory speech will not have reassured them, writes John Crace: “The clockwork ran down and Radon Liz slurred her way to a stop.” Seán Clarke and Anna Leach have a breakdown of the race round by round here. And in the Observer, Toby Helm and Michael Savage told the story of Truss’s campaign from an unpromising start – including the moment when she tried to leave her own launch via the window.
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The policies: can she reverse without crashing?
Before she can think about loosening the shackles of the state on those misunderstood drivers too long forced to travel under the hideous yoke of motorway speed limits, Liz Truss must set out a plan to deal with the cost of living crisis: to the victor, the toils.
You will know by now that while she has promised to freeze national insurance and cut green levies on petrol, her offer on energy bills has so far been opaque. But one option said to be under consideration in reports today is effectively capping the wholesale price of gas by guaranteeing loans to providers, a move that would protect households and businesses alike from further increases to energy bills - a massive intervention that would go beyond Labour’s offer.
For a wider picture of her approach on everything from the climate crisis to the culture war, see this explainer by Peter Walker. And for a trenchant view on what she ought to do, read this piece by Simon Jenkins: “Provided she pursues her past habit of adjusting her ideas to the prevailing wind, she may just come through the next year with her standing enhanced,” he writes. Do the opposite of everything she’s promised her party and she might be all right, is another way of putting it.
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The chancellor: what to expect from Kwasi Kwarteng
Downing Street will be nothing new for the likely chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng: he already lives on the same street as Liz Truss in Greenwich, which if nothing else is a helpful reminder of the value of being nice to even your strangest neighbours. For more on the corner of south-east London that must now labour under the title of “spiritual home of Trussism”, see this Observer piece by Tim Lewis from last month.
Kwarteng faces the most daunting of tasks at the Treasury: Phillip Inman and Richard Partington have the intimidating intray. William Davies writes witheringly about Kwarteng and Truss’ belief in supply-side economics, noting that it seems “troublingly immune to evidence against it,” but adds that it looks likely to be swiftly abandoned in practice.
For a really interesting glimpse of Kwarteng’s views beyond the economy, see Amelia Gentleman’s close reading of his 2010 book about the British empire – which reveals a decidedly anti-zeitgeisty clarity that, actually, it wasn’t all a terrific success. If you want a deeper sense of the man, this long video interview from 2019 is full of interesting insights on his worldview – including his fundamental scepticism of whether economics counts as a science.
Kwarteng’s likely appointment is far from the only personnel change. Aubrey Allegretti reports that Nadine Dorries and Priti Patel are both leaving the government, while Rowena Mason runs you through Truss’ shiny new inner circle. And Aina J Khan reports on a historic first: for the first time, the UK’s four great offices of state may not feature a white man.
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The opposition: Labour braces for a bounce
After a summer of scarcely believable good fortune, Keir Starmer must now face up to a future where the Conservative party may replace its appetite for ritualistic self-harm with an attempt to actually do something. Pippa Crerar wrote last month that Labour expects Truss to get a prime ministerial bounce of about 6%. Then again, a snap poll for YouGov yesterday found that 50% of Britons were disappointed that she will be the next PM, against 22% who were pleased – a view echoed in on-the-ground pieces from Josh Halliday in the “red wall” seat of Bassetlaw and Jessica Murray in Truss’ own South West Norfolk constituency.
Labour hope that any appeal to voters will quickly fade as they get to know her better. Read this piece by Peter Walker for the assessment of party staffers, who claim Truss has a “weird tendency to dig in and say: ‘No, I meant to do that’” and may appear inauthentic. At the same time, they note: “There’s a definite respect for her. It’s just going to come down to the fact that we think she’s wrong about everything.”
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The life: charming the Turnip Taliban
“Margaret Thatcher was quite a long time ago,” Truss told the Observer in 2009. “We have new battles to fight.” Well, that was a long time ago, too.
These days, Truss is significantly more comfortable with a bit of Maggie-channelling time travel. This July profile explains how she won over the hardline rural “Turnip Taliban” in her constituency, and has plenty more insight besides, from her mysterious claims about her highly successful school’s alleged low standards to her spirited attempts to decorate a Lib Dem stall at freshers’ week with “Free the Weed” posters.
Of course, it’s not just Truss arriving in Downing Street today. Amelia Hill and Pippa Crerar explain what life living above the shop might mean for her two teenage daughters, while Catherine Bennett ponders why her low-profile accountant husband Hugh O’Leary – who we got a rare sighting of yesterday – may not wish to succeed Carrie Symonds as Downing Street’s Princess Nut-Nut.
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The predecessor: Clement Attlee or Captain Hook?
After the next 103 words, you can stop thinking about Boris Johnson. Vernon Bogdanor writes that his administration was fatally undermined by his flexible view of the rules but may, like Clement Attlee’s, ultimately be viewed more positively than it is today. James Graham takes a less sympathetic view, noting a series of uncanny similarities with Captain Hook, including their shared appetite for “playing a version of themselves – villain and clown”. Nesrine Malik concludes that Johnson was chronically, disastrously, overestimated: “The problem is, it wasn’t an act. And the insistence that it was, that Johnson was not as bad as he seemed, has been the making of him.”
And that’s it! You survived. Johnson is gone. Until he tires of earning a fortune on the after-dinner circuit and starts agitating for another crack at the top job, that is.
What else we’ve been reading
Zoe Williams has a withering take in today’s G2 on the “elaborate performance of pointlessness” that is an incoming PM’s visit to the Queen to be invited to form a government. Her bracing humour is a bleak balm for chaotic times. Craille Maguire Gillies, production editor, newsletters
I loved Stuart Kenny’s account of his addiction to online blitz chess and how it ended up “rotting his brain”, and I don’t think that’s just because of how alarmingly familiar it is. Can’t say I’ve ever picked up a book about Catalan opening theory, though. Archie
Vincent Mundy has a fascinating piece about “warWilding”: the practice of deploying the natural world as a weapon of war, from Saddam draining the marshes of central Iraq to how flooding Ukraine’s Irpin River saved Kyiv from the Russians. Archie
I look forward to reading Rachel Roddy’s unpublished manuscript How to Turn any Vegetable into a Pasta Sauce. In the meantime, I’ll make do with Roddy’s expert advice on how to deal with the pesky courgette, a bottom of the crisper veg IMHO: her pasta con le zucchine sounds just my kind of manageable. Craille
Jon Day’s recent piece for the LRB on the psychology of hoarding is a rich exploration of an “aesthetic problem” that has become a “modern malady”. It’s full of useless treasure. Archie
Sport
Tennis | American Frances Tiafoe pulled off a shock victory over Rafael Nadal in the US Open last night to reach the quarter-finals, while Britain’s Cameron Norrie threw in a rare poor performance when he lost in straight sets to Andrey Rublev.
Football | England coach Sarina Wiegman says her Euro-winning Lionesses want to put on a show when they play Luxembourg in their final World Cup qualifier at a sold-out Stoke tonight.
Football | Middlesbrough pulled themselves out of the Championship’s bottom three with a hard-fought 1-0 win over Sunderland in the Tees-Wear derby in front of more than 30,000 people at the Riverside.
The front pages
The Mail has an exultant Truss on the front page and proclaims “Cometh the hour, cometh the woman…”. The Times goes with a very similar picture and the headline “Straight to business”, while the Sun says “Liz puts her foot on the gas”. The Express asks us to “Put faith in Truss to deliver for Britain” and the Metro’s splash is “Liz: I will deliver”. The Guardian poses a question for the new PM with “Truss wins - but can she avert the looming crisis?”, while the Telegraph provides some of the answer – “Energy bills to be frozen until the next election” – and there’s also more detail in the Financial Times – “Truss in £100bn energy plan”. The i also goes with that line: “Truss plans to freeze energy bills until January”. The Mirror takes a more jaundiced view with its front page composite picture of the last four prime ministers, blaming them for wrecking the economy: “Same old Tories”. The Record moves that on and says “Call a general election now”. Read a full roundup of the papers here.
Today in Focus
What can Britain expect from Liz Truss as prime minister?
Liz Truss succeeds Boris Johnson as prime minister in the midst of a cost of living crisis on top of a bulging in-tray of difficult issues. Pippa Crerar explains how she will approach the job and how she may differ from her predecessor
Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
This week, the Guardian’s How we met column highlights a heartwarming later-in-life romance between Alison and Michael, aged 83 and 92 respectively. When Alison’s husband died in 2010, she found a new penpal in the form of his old friend Michael. After Michael’s wife died, the pair continued to correspond via post, eventually starting a relationship and marrying in 2016. “My heart muscles strengthened and I was discharged from cardiology,” says Alison. “I attribute it to my happiness … people think older people can’t fall in love, but we definitely can.”
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
