Blink, and history could easily miss her. For all the crazed drama of the last few days, Liz Truss will be remembered by generations to come as little more than a surreal footnote in British politics. She’ll go down as our six-week leader, outlasted by an iceberg lettuce thoughtfully given its own webcam by the Daily Star, yet contriving almost to break the economy even in that short time.
Now barely 24 hours after declaring herself a fighter not a quitter, she has quit and started the mother of all fights. The Conservative party has accelerated what was already a thriving debate about who should succeed her, and is seemingly following the post-Brexit rule that no matter how bad things are, someone can always imagine a way of making them worse. Enter the rage-inducing, blood-boiling, utterly implausible (and yet never quite implausible enough for comfort) threat of a Boris Johnson comeback. Enough, for God’s sake, is enough.
What makes it worse is that Truss’s second chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, opened a brief window of hope in the six and a half days he served as a sort of kindly live-in carer to a broken prime minister. At least he scrapped her toxic budget, steadied markets in a way that undoubtedly saved households money, brought a pragmatist or two in, and showed his party a more cool-headed way to govern. But he ran out of time to complete an always madly ambitious mission to bring his party to its senses at high speed, and now an ugly battle for control of the country beckons.
Hunt won’t run for leader: it turns out he meant it when he said this comeback wasn’t about him. Once again, an unelected Conservative prime minister is now expected to succeed another unelected Conservative prime minister in a process that makes a mockery of democracy. But this time it pits a half-finished Tory centrist revival against the but-Brexit-was-never-properly-tried tendency and whatever Johnson can cobble together from his Caribbean sunlounger, where the man still under investigation for lying to parliament is said to be “taking soundings”. (Of course he is on holiday, as the country falls apart under his anointed successor; of course he is.) There must be a general election, to state the bleeding obvious, the minute the Conservative party has a leader again. But first, Conservatives must have the backbone to resist going back to their ex, or anyone remotely like him.
This is their moment, finally, to root the chancers out. For six long years, all that mattered in British politics was being on the “right” side of Brexit. We have laboured under governments packed with at best amiable C-listers who wouldn’t get near power normally, and at worst crackpots and zealots. In government, the incompetent (and worse) thrived; Theresa May became too weakened to sack them, and later it suited Johnson not to bother. Labour tied itself up in knots over the B-word. Tory remainers quit, leaving a dried-up talent pool from which Tory MPs then fished badly.
Shame on those who knew Truss wasn’t up to it but backed her anyway, guessing she’d be the choice of a membership radicalised by Brexit and hoping to get a government job. But shame, too, on those who had already let the bar fall so low that anything seemed possible. Shame on Johnson, who egged his friends on to vote Truss partly to spite Rishi Sunak and partly, one suspects, thinking she’d fail and potentially allow him a comeback. Shame on the rightwing newspapers that lionised her (and indulged him) right up until she cost their readers hundreds of pounds a month on their mortgages. The Tory backbencher Charles Walker hit the nail on the head with his viral outburst against “talentless people putting their tick in the right box” for selfish reasons. But now they’re getting the pencil back, possibly informed (according to one suggestion) by a poll of those Conservative party members who previously gave us Johnson and Truss.
In her unrepentant resignation speech, Truss pointedly cited the “mandate” she thinks she was given (although never by the country) for a low-tax economy maximising the still imaginary opportunities of Brexit. It was a clear plea for someone to keep that flame alive. Any centrist candidate trying to build on what Hunt started will meanwhile be accused of staging a “remainer coup”, even though nobody is advocating rejoining the EU (sadly) and the whole point of a movement embracing leavers such as Michael Gove and Sunak was to move beyond Brexit, to confront the new economic challenge Truss bequeathes them. Tory Brexiters rightly, however, sense a threat to their dominance of the party if reality-adjacent politics returns. Someone like Johnson could play remorselessly on that.
Hunt-style centre-ground Conservatism, in this economic climate, is unlikely to produce a government that Labour voters like. But that’s not what Conservatives exist to do, and it’s not the yardstick by which to judge them. The Hunt strategy was essentially to keep Truss in place until 31 October, avoiding an unpredictable leadership contest spooking the markets, while he compiled an austerity package to convince investors that Britain’s wild experiment with Trussonomics was over. That strategy failed when No 10 bungled a bit of minor Labour parliamentary mischief over fracking so badly that chief whip Wendy Morton reportedly resigned in the voting lobby, before later un-resigning, while her deputy was overheard saying he was “fucking furious and I don’t give a fuck any more”. Unsurprisingly, MPs concluded they couldn’t wait even 11 days.
The 31 October deadline by which Hunt was due to deliver £40bn-worth of tax rises and spending cuts, filling the hole Kwasi Kwarteng created, will presumably shift forward now. But that clock is still ticking, the economic imperative unchanged. The politics of putting that package together, however, has just become infinitely harder.
Already, it was becoming clear that there was no Tory majority in parliament for ideas such as scrapping the triple pensions lock – or indeed for not uprating benefits in line with inflation. Given almost any conceivable big spending cut or tax rise risks enraging some part of a now ungovernable Conservative party, what ambitious leadership candidate will agree to anything much on the campaign trail?
The worst-case scenario, then, is of Britain stumbling from an economic and political crisis into something like a Greek-style democratic one, where markets demand their pound of flesh, but voters understandably balk, and politics tears itself apart in the middle. The country hangs by a thread. Give Boris Johnson the end of it, and we unravel.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
