November 14, 2024
Mike Phipps reviews Truss at 10: How not to be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon, published by Atlantic.
When the Conservative Party, at the end of the last century, decided to give the final say in its leadership elections to its grassroots members, it unwittingly institutionalised a fundamental instability in the Party. Iain Duncan Smith won the leadership in 2001 without the backing of his MPs and he lasted just two years. Had Liz Truss been smarter, she would have absorbed the warning: like him, she won the leadership only because the Party members usually vote for the most right wing candidate, irrespective of ability. It is a precarious basis on which to build support.
But – as well as being disloyal, disruptive and a serial leaker – Truss wasn’t very smart. Even her supporters knew it: when she came second in the final round of MPs’ voting, making her the favourite in the membership ballot against Rishi Sunak, one aide recalled: “I felt a slight sense of dread when I heard. And I’m sure I was not the only one thinking ‘Is she really up to it?’”
It wasn’t just Truss, of course. The summer of 2022 saw the Tories embark on a collective death-wish – a long, nasty leadership campaign, with multiple candidates indulging in self-destructive mutual denigration of each other’s ministerial records, all at a time when the Tories’ public support was in freefall following Boris Johnson being forced to resign in disgrace. Whatever happened to the Party’s survival instinct?
Truss’s predecessor can be blamed for much of the toxic culture at the top of the Party. Johnosn himself played a significant role in feeding the ‘betrayal narrative’ – that Sunak had conspired to bring the unimpeachable Johnson down. For Truss to have won peddling this distortion underlined the shaky foundations of her premiership.
Keep your head
Victory went to Truss’s head. She mistook endorsement by 57% of the Tory grassroots -0.3% of the British electorate – for a popular mandate, although she was savvy enough to realise that if she were to call a snap election she would be trounced.
Despite Johnson’s (lukewarm) support, Truss proposed a radical departure from his far- from-enacted 2019 manifesto. Had she studied her history, notes Seldon, she would have realised that, wartime excepted, no agenda-changing Prime Minister comes to office at the end of a long period of one-party ascendancy. She was attempting the impossible.
Yet her radical tax-cutting economic line was prepared and set out to government officials even before she won the leadership. At the end of one meeting in August, one Truss advisor passed a note to a senior Cabinet Office official: “No way can you do this politically… It’s f**king mental.” “I agree,” wrote the official covertly back to him.
At a time when it would have been wiser to build bridges to an unconvinced parliamentary party, Truss became, “according to those who had known her for several years, tetchier, more distrustful and imperious… Her trait of humiliating her team in front of others became more pronounced.”
Her new Cabinet was narrowly based, with only token attempts to reach out to her opponents. Her first act on becoming Prime Minister was to sack the top civil servant at the Treasury, ostensibly demonstrating her power, but in reality sacrificing vital experience.
Flat-earth economics
Despite strong advice to the contrary from ministers and economists, Truss decided to go for immediate tax cuts, without reducing spending. Mistrustful of the financial establishment, she excluded the Office for Budget Responsibility from her preparations.
The ‘blob’ – the OBR, the Treasury and the Bank of England – was supposedly determined to thwart her and should at all costs be kept out of the planning – although Truss would later claim they had not warned her of the risks in what she was proposing. Her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng could have resisted but opted instead for meek acquiescence.
His ‘mini-budget’ was delivered to Parliament on Friday September 23rd 2022. It removed the cap on bankers’ bonuses and introduced the biggest tax cuts in fifty years, as well as considerable spending on an energy support package. Most Tory newspapers loved it, but the Financial Times called it “kamikaze” and the Economist deemed it economically illiterate. The pound fell to its lowest level against the dollar since the 1980s – but it would fall further.
As markets panicked, Kwarteng was advised to go on TV to calm things down. Truss, however, instructed him not to be apologetic but to declare: “There’s more to come.”
“It was a foolish thing to say,” Kwarteng admitted later, but by then the havoc had been unleashed. As the markets began dumping British assets, the Bank had to step in to counter the downward spiral and stabilise things – at great public cost.
Truss attempted to repair her reputation in a series of supposedly ‘safe’ interviews with local radio stations. “It proved a humiliation,” writes Seldon. Meanwhile, Labour opened up a 33 point poll lead.
Truss was privately convinced that her enemies had deliberately stoked market panic – as if global markets could be thus rigged with a few phone calls. From within the small bubble in which she operated, she was utterly unaware of the rising anger in her party and the wider public. As reality dawned, she demanded the reversal of the decision to abolish the 45p tax rate, which had become “a distraction”. More U-turns would follow.
Despite a shambolic party conference, Truss railed against the ‘anti-growth coalition’ and the grassroots applauded euphorically – which tells us a lot about the rank and file Tory membership.
A week after the mini-budget, the black hole in the public finances was estimated at £72 billion. Truss was savaged in Parliament at Prime Minister’s Questions and later at a meeting of her own backbenchers. Back at Number Ten, she started shouting at aides and officials to “find the money”. One ‘saving’ floated was to stop cancer treatment on the NHS.
Aides began to realise that the scale of volte face needed – reversing tax cuts and cutting spending – would not look credible to the markets as long as Kwarteng and Truss remained in charge. The Prime Minister understood enough to execute one of the fastest U-turns in history. She also sacked her Chancellor. He told her, “The first question you will get asked by journalists is why you are getting rid of someone who you campaigned with on these policies.” Which is exactly what happened at the subsequent press conference.
Former leadership hopeful Jeremy Hunt replaced Kwarteng. Truss gave him a completely free hand to do whatever was necessary and he duly reversed 90% of the mini-budget. He was effectively Prime Minister of domestic policy. The markets responded positively.
Tragedy to farce
Too late. The parliamentary party had always preferred Rishi Sunak to Liz Truss, who had done little to heal the divide. But the gathering storm was now hastened by yet more instances of incompetence: the botched sacking of Home Secretary Suella Braverman for using her personal email to pass government information to a backbencher; the disparaging Number Ten briefing against Sajid Javid, who threatened a public attack in response – “ I will make your life hell,” he telephoned Truss; and her contemptuous attitude to her Chief Whip, the vital channel of communication to her backbenchers.
In the latter case, Truss had foolishly allowed a controversial parliamentary vote in favour of fracking to be turned into a question of confidence in the government, only for her advisors to call it off when they realised she might not win it. Chief Whip Wendy Morton resigned and then was persuaded to reconsider: House of Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt found her and Truss making up over a glass of wine and shouted at them both to exercise some leadership over a House of Commons which had descended into chaos at the lack of clarity over the vote.
It was the final straw and Truss knew it. The next morning she resigned.
Later, she would complain that she had been thwarted by the ‘deep state’, but her sacking of top officials and sidelining of institutions undermines that claim. Certainly, her constituents were unimpressed, overturning a 26,000 vote majority to kick her out in July’s general election.
Unaccountable power
Because Seldon has structured his chapters around the ten key qualities he believes a Prime Minister should possess, his narrative is not as fluent as in his other books on Truss’s predecessors. When he gets to her character flaws, he is rightly quite brutal: charmless, unsteady, brittle, ungenerous, not a team builder, poor judgment, lacking nuance… “her vanity, neediness and willingness to trample over others was of Johnsonian proportions,” he writes. In fact, Johnson should be blamed more for normalising and even revelling in such traits.
But what’s missing from this account is the sheer amount of damage done to people’s pensions, mortgages and livelihoods by the utter recklessness of Truss’s economic adventurism. That she had no mandate for the policy and paid a personal price for her incompetence does not diminish the fact that there is too much unaccountable power vested in the highest office of state, which allows a prime minister to trade jobs and patronage for political support. Hoping for better leadership does not detract from that fundamental point. If Prime Ministers make a terrible mess of things – not just Truss, but many of her predecessors – it’s because they have the unchecked power to do so.
Liz Truss lasted fewer than fifty days in office. For nearly a fortnight of that time, normal politics was suspended in the aftermath of the Queen’s death. But for that intermission, her tenure might have been even shorter. The worst Prime Minister ever? She’s certainly a contender, but it is a crowded field.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
