On Monday, senior Conservative MP Sir Charles Walker called for Liz Truss to stand down as prime minister by labelling her “catastrophically incompetent”.
On Tuesday, in the East Midlands city of Derby, such a verdict appeared to be widely considered too kind.
Shoppers, business owners and – that oft-most indicative of zeitgeist barometers – people in pubs told The Independent she was the worst prime minister of their lifetimes. And that a general election must now be called.
Some called for Boris Johnson to be brought back.
“I haven’t voted for years,” said one, retired coal miner Pete Ford, 69, as he sat in the city’s Market Place. “Why not? Because none of them are worth going out and getting cold for. But I don’t think we can see the back [of Truss] quick enough. It’s a tough field but I can’t ever remember a prime minister so embarrassingly out of her depth.”
His wife Vicky, a retired headteacher, was, if anything, even less diplomatic.
“A waste of space,” the 66-year-old grandmother declared. “She said whatever she needed to say to get this job [during the Conservative leadership race], and now she’s shown herself completely incapable of doing it. It’s excruciating. She’s all self-regard and no substance.”
The mini-Budget had gone down about as well with voters here as it had with the markets. An attack on the poor, according to 45-year-old Joanne Kidd as she paused for a rest on her mobility scooter. “An attack on people like me,” she added.
Yet, if Monday’s U-turn on said mini-Budget had at least succeeded in slightly lifting the value of the pound after it crashed to an all-time low, it did not appear to have had the same rescuing effect on the public’s view of Truss. It is an irony, perhaps, that changing her course appears only to have highlighted just how devastatingly inadequate her economic worldview was in the first place.
“If you give a [uncosted] budget like that, of course you’re going to trash the economy,” said electrician Mark Howe as he dragged on a cigarette outside The Standing Order pub. “Imagine me going to the bank and demanding X amount for a house but I won’t tell them how I’m going to pay it back. They’d laugh me out the building. She’s done the same thing.”
Such views, of course, are not unexpected right now.
Yet that quite such fury exists on such a scale in somewhere like Derby feels especially significant. This is a bi-party city. It is covered by two parliamentary constituencies: Derby South is Labour, Derby North is Tory. The council here is split almost straight down the middle: 18 blue and 16 red alongside a handful of Lib Dems and independents.
It is, in short, the sort of place where one expects a mix of political views. That there appears universal anger towards Truss – and the overwhelming belief she is not up to the job – feels irredeemably damning.
Certainly, in the vegetarian cafe he opened five years ago Bal Dhamrait was keen to see the new PM quickly become the old PM. Asked if there should be a general election, the 35-year-old answered with almost indecent haste. “One hundred per cent,” he said.
Why? “Because no one chose her,” came the reply. “And I don’t think anyone would have done.”
As said, it was one brutal take after another.
Dhamrait, himself – whose eatery is called Vedi – has long been preparing to weather the economic storm this winter. As his energy and food costs rise, he expects customer numbers to simultaneously fall. “We’ll lose money, no doubt,” the father-of-two said. “But this is a long-term family business so the aim is you ride it out, get through that difficult period and come out with your business still standing.”
But now the political uncertainty has left him worried that the tough times may go on much longer than he or anyone had envisaged. New chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s decision to end the current energy support package in April – as opposed to 2024 as Truss promised – had only added to that feeling of precariousness, Dhamrait reckoned.
“As a business, you need to know what your costs are going to be so you can plan and budget,” he said. “But now we’re back in the same position that we were a few weeks ago: no idea how much we’re going to be charged for our electricity come spring. We’re already paying more for it than we are [in] rent. That’s not sustainable – for us or for any other business.”
He’d called for an election. Who would he vote for? He didn’t know yet. He would decide at the time. But he could guarantee one thing. “It won’t be the Conservatives,” he said. “They’re out of solutions; out of ideas.”
What if they replaced their leader? A shake of the head: still no.
Neither would Evie Harris be voting blue anytime soon – although, to be fair, that’s because she’s only 16.
All the same, as the A-level student enjoyed lunch in Market Place, her words felt especially pointed.
“I’ve lived under the Tories pretty much all my life,” she said. “Seems to me the country’s no better now than when they got in. So, what would be the point of voting for them again?”
