The inconstant meaning of Liz Truss

The would-be prime minister is a politician of firm convictions. Until she decides to change them.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays the politician tipped to be Britain’s next prime minister likes to style herself as the loyal heir to Boris Johnson. During the rest of the week, Liz Truss reaches further back into Conservative party folklore to claim the mantle of Margaret Thatcher.

This makes her campaign for the Tory leadership seem curious in several dimensions. First off, Johnson’s approval ratings are about as low as they get. Brought down by the serial lying that led to a walk-out by dozens of his own ministers, he leaves the premiership in disgrace. Hardly a role model. Truss says her politics are rooted in a principled desire for low taxes and a small state. Johnson’s tenure, devoid of ideas or conviction, was all about the pursuit of personal ambition.

The self-identification with Thatcher is also puzzling. Whatever one thinks of the Lady’s record - and Truss’s recollection of it is at best partial - Britain is in no mood for hang-the-state-and-let-the-market-rip neoliberalism.  In her eagerness to promise tax cuts, Truss has anyway forgotten the other half of the story. She is ready to let borrowing rip. Thatcher believed in thrift.

This is not a small state moment. Faced with cuts in real incomes and runaway energy prices,  the nation is not crying out for austerity. The economy has stalled, inflation is heading into double figures, and living standards are falling. Six years after Brexit, Britain is falling further behind its European peers.  All this as public services - notably the National Health Service - are at breaking point under the strain of rising demand and inadequate resources.

Truss can dream as much as she wishes about cutting taxes and rolling back the frontiers of the state. Britain is getting older and demanding better public services. If and when she makes it to No 10, Truss will face a clamour for more government. 

The popular demand is for higher, not lower spending, starting with additional compensation for runaway energy prices. Truss the candidate can disparage such measures as “handouts”,  and think out loud about long-term measures to raise North Sea output. Truss the prime minister will have to swallow her objections to benefit payments and write a very large cheque.

The contradictions do not stop here. True, Truss bears a resemblance to Johnson in a constant search for political “dividing lines” - the so-called wedge issues at the heart of the far right’s culture wars. But when it comes to the economy, she is running against the spending and tax increases Johnson himself put in place. Blaming it all on her opponent, the former chancellor Rishi Sunak, only works if she also casts Johnson as a feeble prisoner of the Treasury. 

Europe throws up another set of  inconsistencies. As a member of David Cameron’s government Truss campaigned vigorously for Britain to remain in the EU. Now, in order to secure the backing of the Brexit fanatics on the Tory back benches, she waves the baton of English nationalism. By championing Northern Ireland legislation to tear up Britain’s legal obligations to the EU, she has put herself at the head of those who see Brexit as merely the opening shot in a culture war against all things European and most things foreign. 

The kind interpretation of all this is that Truss is merely tailoring her campaign to circumstance. Call it political opportunism. She needed the Brexit fundamentalists to get on the leadership ballot paper, and now she is measuring her message against the predilections and prejudices of the grassroots Tories who decide the outcome. She has noticed that many local activists seem somehow to have persuaded themselves that Johnson was the victim of an unwarranted coup by ungrateful Tory MPs. 

There are few hard and fast facts about the demography of the estimated 150,000 party members. Few Conservative MPs, however, would quarrel with the characterisation of Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University. “Older, well-off, white southerners may be a wee bit of a caricature”, he told the Financial Times, “but it isn’t so very far from the truth.” One Tory MP I know says the average age of members of his local association is touching 75.

There are snags, though, to pandering to this particular electorate, most obviously that it is wholly unrepresentative of the country Truss wants to lead. Wealthy, home-owning pensioners living comfortably in the home counties scarcely hold up a mirror to the vast majority of voters either in economic status or political outlook. The moment she enters Downing Street, all those promises to her own troops will have to be set alongside the louder demands of the nation.

She will also discover that you cannot change the laws of economics by promising to neuter the Treasury or to change the remit of the Bank of England. If she really does want to fund big tax cuts for the better off with higher borrowing she will discover that a looser fiscal policy will push up interest rates. 

Higher mortgage rates will not be popular. Nor will a possible trade war with Brussels as the economy heads into recession. And how will those “Red Wall” voters feel about her proposed huge handout to industry through lower corporation tax? Presumably it would be paid for by a further squeeze on public services.

None of this is to say that Truss does not have views of her own. To the contrary, she appears ready to flit from one idea to another with barely a blink. Marc Stears, who taught her at university, puts it thus: “Her most noticeable characteristic is a capacity to shift, unblinkingly, from one fiercely held belief to another”. Presumably, she now feels as strongly about cutting back the size of the state as she once did about abolishing the monarchy.

It may be, of course, that the opinion polls showing Truss will record an easy victory over Sunak are mistaken. Perhaps the activists may opt in the end for sobriety over faddism. Either way, the leadership contest has shown that neither the contenders nor the Tory party have any idea of the economic and political hurricane set to hit the country, and its new prime minister, in the autumn.