The Conservatives have been broken by Brexit

Britain needs a general election before it can set out on a path to recovery

Liz Truss was never any good. A governing strategy grounded in far right zealotry and wilful economic ignorance was always going to end in humiliation. Doubtless the prime minister will now be thrown overboard.

For all that her fate will be richly deserved, Truss is symptom as well as cause of the Conservatives’ dismal failure. There is no way back for a party in the thrall of little England fundamentalists. The fervent hope now must be that we do not have to wait until 2024 for a general election to remove it from office.

Truss’s elevation to the premiership saw a serial liar replaced in Downing Street by a callow ideologue lacking both political stature and economic good sense. Whatever the contrasts of personality, Boris Johnson and his successor (once a pro-European) told the same mendacious story. Britain will be more prosperous and influential in the world as a consequence of its decision to tear itself out of its own continent. Both pay lip service to the union of the United Kingdom. In truth, they have recast their party as the champion of English nationalism.

Johnson was lucky. It has been obvious to all that businesses in every corner of the economy have suffered grievously from the Brexit barriers to trade, investment and employment with the nation’s most important economic partner. But first Covid and the energy crisis caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine have made it difficult to calibrate the precise economic cost of the nation’s lurch to protectionism. Truss’s delusion was she could recreate Britain as Singapore-on-Thames with debt-funded tax cuts. The result is that it now more closely resembles Caracas-on-Thames.

The nation is waking up only slowly to its self-isolation on the global stage. The Brexiters’ populist assault on institutions at home - parliament, the judiciary, the civil service, the BBC, the Bank of England, and anyone who can be denigrated as an “expert” - has been matched by careless disdain for Britain’s international obligations. 

Truss’s plan to tear up unilaterally the treaty arrangements with the European Union governing trade with Northern Ireland represent a flagrant violation of international law. It has drained the trust not just of European allies but of the United States. The nation’s diplomats cannot recall a time when Britain’s standing was so low.

Truss wavered for a month before declaring that French president Emmanuel Macron should be seen as an ally rather than an enemy. She has spent the same period scrambling desperately to secure a photo-call at the White House. So far to no avail. The US administration has been clear about its priorities. Macron has been invited for a full pomp-and-ceremony state visit to Washington - the first of Joe Biden’s presidency.  For all its vocal support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, Britain is widely viewed as irrelevant.

The costs of breaking with Europe, of course, have reached beyond the economic, political and diplomatic. Cultural, educational and scientific ties have been ruptured by the government’s obsessional determination to end any association with any institutions it deems beholden to Brussels. Brexit, always an act of self-harm and often seemingly one of spite, has become an obsession - a state of mind rooted in the absurd notion that, as in 1940, the nation can stand alone amid any international storm.

It fell to financial markets to shatter the delusions. Truss and her now sacked-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng were warned that international investors would take flight in the face of unfunded tax cuts. Their answer was to dismiss the head of the Treasury, seek to muzzle the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, denigrate the Bank of England and attack the International Monetary Fund as “biased”.

No-one with a slight acquaintance with economics or a distant memory of how the Labour government was similarly laid low by the markets in 1976 was surprised by the outcome.

Getting rid of Truss will not solve anything. Her party has come to resemble a sect. Brexit courses like a poison through its bloodstream. Whether old-fashioned Conservatism can be remade in opposition is an open question. 

More certain is that rebuilding Britain’s economic strength at home and its standing abroad will be a decade-long project for a government that will need to combine honesty with competence and ambition with humility.

Keir Starmer’s Labour party can now sense power within its grasp. Understandably after a dozen years in the wilderness, it is excited by the prospect of governing. Given its likely inheritance it should also be fearful of the responsibility.