After jettisoning Boris Johnson, the Tories won’t hesitate to dump Liz Truss

Neither Britain nor the Conservatives are ready to be governed by the reactionary right

Britain’s voters want the government to help pay their soaring energy bills. Liz Truss says she will shrink the state. A resource-starved National Health Service is sliding into crisis. Britain’s likely next prime minister plans to spend the money on corporate tax cuts. Living standards are falling, inflation is accelerating and recession looms. The Truss response is to start a trade war with Britain’s most important economic partners by tearing up the Brexit deal with the EU. Scottish voters are flirting with independence. Truss says she will simply “ignore” Scotland’s elected first minister. The list, sadly, goes on.

The cliche has it that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Put another way, all leaders are confronted with the task of bridging the gap between extravagant promises made on the campaign trail and the prosaic truth of what’s possible in government. With Truss, the danger is entirely different. It is not that she will fall short on delivery but that she will actually try to keep her pledges.

One safe assumption about a Truss premiership - assuming the polls are right about the outcome of the contest with former chancellor Rishi Sunak - is that she will lead a fractured Tory party. The announcement of the result next week will of course be greeted with soaring declarations from all sides about uniting around the new leader. They can safely be ignored.

The rancour of the contest with Sunak will not be easily dispelled. He thinks Truss’s economic prospectus is at once economically illiterate and dangerous. The Treasury establishment pretty much agrees.

Styling herself the heir to Boris Johnson does not help. Sure, it has secured Truss the backing of the barmy army of Tory reactionaries - think Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries. For Johnson himself, though, loyalty is a foreign country. His narcissism does not permit it. As practised in lying to himself as to the country, he has deluded himself that his ejection was somehow unfair. Now he will do what he can to make his successor’s life a misery. 

For all that she appears to be the favourite of the Tory grass roots, Truss will also start out with a more serious handicap. She lacks the respect and confidence of a majority of Tory MPs. Sunak won the leadership ballot among MPs. Truss secured the support of less than a third of the parliamentary party. True, more have since jumped on the bandwagon in the hope of personal advancement. Striking though is the absence of enthusiasm for Truss beyond the right. The cabinet, it seems, is to be filled with Brexit fundamentalists and second rate careerists.

Perhaps that is why a sizeable number of MPs have backed Sunak even since the opinion polls have pointed to a clear victory for Truss among the activists. Here, even before she steps over the threshold of No 10, is the dividing line for the next leadership contest.

Her policies have scarcely broadened her appeal. Ruling out welfare “handouts” for families in the face of exponential rises in energy prices badly jarred with the demands Tory MPs have been hearing in their constituencies. The Truss camp has felt obliged to slightly modify the message. But as ambulances pile up outside hospitals that have run out of beds and patients face long waits for vital treatment, Tory MPs are reporting voters are not reacting well to her plan to prioritise tax cuts for the well-heeled over funding for the NHS or measures to ease the cost of living crisis.

Beyond her coterie of English nationalists, promising a showdown with Brussels over trade arrangements for Northern Ireland and a fight with France’s Emmanuel Macron over the flight of refugees across the English channel look equally eccentric. The Brexit conflict - and associated threat of a trade war with Brussels - can only serve to further weaken business confidence as the economy falls into recession. Does Britain really need a further hit to living standards?

The west, as Truss never ceases to point out, is engaged in a vital struggle with Vladimir Putin following Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine. Here, surely, is a moment for western democracies to stick together. Yet Truss proposes to cock a snook at Britain’s own international treaty obligations, sour relations with Washington, and break with its most important European partners,

There are two theories as to why she has spent the campaign driving into this series of political cul-de-sacs. The first says it has all been a cynical ploy. She needed the votes of the far right to win and intends to steer back towards saner ground once she has the keys to Downing Street. The snag here, of course, is that without a broad base of support among MPs she cannot afford cries of betrayal from her present sponsors.

The more worrying possibility is that she believes her own rhetoric - that, in thrall to the market-is-always-right ideology of the1980s, she actually thinks that Arthur Laffer was right all along and that her economic plans will work. Certainly, she has thus far shown little grasp of either of the scale of the looming economic and political hurricane, or the mood of the country.

If Truss is indeed thus deluded, the Tories will soon be planning another leadership contest. The nation, sadly, will continue to pay the price for the Tory party’s long lurch from centre-right pragmatism into the wilder fringes of English nationalism. Johnson and his predecessor Theresa May each lasted three short years in No 10. Only a brave gambler would bet that Truss will survive that long.