Just how unpopular is Liz Truss's government?

James Hockaday

Wed, September 28, 2022 

Much of the public are yet to make up their minds about the new prime minister (PA Images)

Less than a month into her job as prime minister, Liz Truss is facing a crash in the value of the pound, soaring inflation, rising interest rates and a looming recession.

Just two days after entering Number 10, Truss revealed her £60 billion plan to help keep energy bills down amid a cost of living crisis, but her long awaited proposal was overshadowed by the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

Now the government is facing criticism from the International Monetary Fund over its raft of tax cuts revealed by chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, which disproportionately benefit the rich.

The Treasury said this would be paid for by a ramping up of public borrowing, which left investors spooked and prompted a crash in the pound, which is expected to add to the UK's crippling inflation.

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng's tax and borrowing plans have fuelled a crash in the pound. (Getty Images)

On top of that, on Wednesday the Bank of England launched an emergency government bond-buying programme to prevent borrowing costs from spiralling out of control and stave off a “material risk to UK financial stability”.

Truss certainly has a lot on her plate since becoming the UK's fourth prime minister in a little over six years, but what do the British public think of her and her government so far?

According to polling by Ipsos conducted from 7 to 15 September 2022, 70% of the public are dissatisfied with how the new government is preforming, while just 20% think it is doing a good job.

As for Truss herself, many voters are yet to make their minds up.

Some 44% of the survey's participants said they couldn't decide if she was doing well, compared to 29% who are dissatisfied with how she is doing and 27% who are satisfied.

Read more: Close friend of Liz Truss says: 'You won't like this budget if you care about the poor'

The outlook for Liz Truss is uncertain, as much of the public are undecided on her performance. (Yahoo News)

How does this compare to other prime ministers?

Truss has the lowest approval ratings of the UK's most recent PMs who have taken office mid-parliament.

According to pollsters, 31% of the public were satisfied with Boris Johnson as he started as prime minister, compared with 27% for his successor.

Theresa May enjoyed a 54% approval rating in her early days, compared to 36% for Gordon Brown and 37% for John Major.

Ms Truss is less popular than her prefecessors when they first entered No 10. (Yahoo News)

Read more: Liz Truss dismisses Vladimir Putin's nuclear warning as 'bogus threat'

What about a general election?

The latest Westminster polling figures make for grim reading for Truss.

According to the latest data from YouGov, 45% of voters would back Labour in a general election, compared to 28% who would back the Tories. This represents a severe hit to the Conservatives’ numbers since Kwarteng revealed his mini budget.

On specific issues, Ipsos polling foundvoters had more trust in Labour to manage Brexit, tackle the cost of living, set the right level of taxation and improve the NHS, reduce inequality between regions and protect the environment.

Labour was also in the lead on managing immigration and reducing crime - issues often seen as natural territory of the Conservative Party.

The only two issues the Tories were leading on was managing inflation and growing the economy.

Labour is leading on many issues and are also currently ahead in Westminster voting intention polls. (Yahoo News)

Keiran Pedley, Director of Politics at Ipsos UK, said: “With the Conservatives ahead on growing the economy and managing inflation and Labour ahead on the cost of living, NHS and levelling-up, we can see the contours of a potential future general election campaign in these numbers.

"Meanwhile, whilst there is no obvious sign of a significant polling bounce for Liz Truss in the numbers here, they are an improvement on her predecessor’s final numbers.

"The new Prime Minister will hope that recent events mean that her political honeymoon is delayed rather than denied; as we head into what is likely to be a challenging winter."

Liz Truss learns the hard way that Britain is not the US

Janan Ganesh: Reaganism is a good idea, but Reaganism without the dollar isn’t



British prime minister Liz Truss and chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng during a visit to Berkeley Modular in Northfleet Kent on Friday to coincide with the announcement of the government's new growth plan. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/PA Wire

Janan Ganesh
Tue Sep 27 2022 - 

Into Brideshead Revisited, near the middle, Evelyn Waugh crowbars a scene on a cruise ship for the express purpose of mocking Americans. There is a character named “Senator Stuyvesant-Oglander”. Each and every drink has ice in it. No one is able to tell friendship from desperate bonhomie. The crustiest of England’s great novelists wrote better stuff, no doubt, but the passage is an illuminating fragment of a time when anti-Americanism was a Tory thing.

And one that had its uses. If nothing else, Britain’s establishment was clear back then that America was a different country. A midsized archipelago couldn’t look to a resource-rich market of continental magnitude for governmental ideas.

If anti-Americanism was bad, look what its opposite has done. Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. The UK does not issue the world’s reserve currency. It does not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt. It can’t, as US Republicans sometimes do, cut taxes on the hunch that lawmakers of the future will trim public spending. Reaganism was a good idea. Reaganism without the dollar isn’t. If UK premier Liz Truss has a programme, though, that is its four-word expression.

So much of what Britain has done and thought in recent years makes sense if you assume it is a country of 330 million people with $20 trillion annual output. The idea that it could ever look the EU in the eye as an adversarial negotiator, for instance. Or the decision to grow picky about Chinese inward investment at the same time as forfeiting the European market. Or the bet that Washington was going to entertain a meaningful bilateral trade deal. Superpowers get to behave with such presumption.


Why does Britain think that it can, too? Don’t blame imperial nostalgia. (If it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Blame the distorting effect of language. Because the UK’s governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries. What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s. You can see why, from a London angle, the two nations seem comparable.

Reaganism without the dollar: this isn’t one woman’s arbitrary whim. It is the culmination of decades of (unreciprocated) US focus in a Robert Caro-hooked Westminster. You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the world’s best. If Elizabeth II was better than Donald Trump, monarchy beats republicanism tout court. People who can’t name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November. The EU is a, perhaps the, regulatory superpower in the world. UK politicos find Iowa more diverting.

The left is as culpable as Truss. From 2010 to 2015, critics of “austerity” urged the Tories to take the softer US approach. The cross-Atlantic comparison implied that then prime minister David Cameron had King Dollar behind him. Soon after came the importation of identity politics from a republic with a wholly different racial history.

The anti-Americanism of the Waugh generation was petulant. It was sourness at the imperial usurper dressed up as high taste. But at least it had no illusions. The snobs understood that America was alien, and inimitable. Tories who patronised the US – Harold Macmillan, Ted Heath – were quicker than much of the Labour Party to see that Britain belonged with Europe.

Truss and her cohort of Tories have none of that snide but ultimately healthy distance from the US. Take her vaunted supply-side revolution. Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim. It isn’t. The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.) Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries.

Some readers balked last month when I wrote that Truss might not last until the next election. Even I didn’t think she would trip so soon. It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022

Janan Ganesh is chief US political commentator for the Financial Times