Liz Truss may not make an exciting or popular Tory leader, but she may have one thing going for her. She may be lucky. A mere 12% of voters expect her to be a good prime minister. But, just as Tony Blair was eased into Downing Street by his handling of the death of Diana (his “people’s princess”), so the death of the Queen could help Truss steady and establish herself.
As the nation enters a period of mourning – grossly oversold by the BBC – Westminster’s current political hysteria should calm. Truss’s crony cabinet can settle in. The Treasury can tend its wounds, while the media turns its attention to King Charles and the future of the monarchy.
Truss already has ground to make up. Her cabinet appointments defied all advice about appeasing her enemies and accommodating different strands in her party. An acrimonious leadership campaign and a close victory over Rishi Sunak clearly demanded some effort at soothing wounds. Truss did the opposite, sacking the few able ministers to survive Boris Johnson’s mayhem, such as George Eustice, Grant Shapps and Greg Clark. Instead, she chose a cabinet defined purely by loyalty to her. Its gender and ethnic diversity was the only thing remarkable about it. With only a minority of her parliamentary party voting for her as leader, she has ensured eagerness for revenge when things start going wrong.
This will come harder, since Truss is no master of the parliamentary stage. A sentence from Johnson could have his backbenchers baying with delight. Truss’s response to questions from Keir Starmer at her first prime minister’s questions had the virtue of directness, but her answers seemed wooden and dull. She could not summon up one memorable phrase in her initial message on the Queen’s passing. She does not do rhetoric, only cliche – “from thick and thin” she said, in a brisk and cursory speech at Downing Street. She might have been reading out a shopping list.
But not all prime ministers are performers. Brevity is a virtue in itself, and minimalism could be Truss’s secret weapon. After Johnson, she has the opportunity to exploit the strength of her weakness. She can take the steam out of every crisis and make it seem boring.
The best news is that, after a life spent trimming her views to the prevailing wind, Truss brings to her job no sense of principle. It took just 24 hours on Monday for her to forget her campaign pledge of “no handouts”. Now she promises the biggest handout in history, upwards of £150bn to subsidise energy bills. On top of that, she allows surely the largest handout to any industry, by declining to tax the energy companies of their stupefying £170bn in excess profits, won by charging those same consumers as a result of sanctions against Russia. She says she will borrow the money from future taxpayers.
Truss opposes windfall taxes as they “deter investment”. This is facile. Given soaring demand for energy, the companies already have huge incentives to invest. Truss may oppose tax and spend, but what is so virtuous in spend and borrow? While France, Germany and most of the EU are taking direct action, including windfall taxes, to break the hold energy suppliers have over their consumers, Truss is stuck in a bunker. It is hard to believe she can stay there for long.
The question now is what other campaign cliches might surrender to Truss’s pragmatism. Will she really slash corporate and personal taxes this year? Will she really open a trade war with the EU over Northern Ireland, just to get a few Unionists into Stormont? Will she really raise defence spending to a staggering 3% of GDP, potentially costing more than any energy subsidy, put by the Royal United Services Institute at £157bn over eight years? Will she really go on spending £100bn on the now outdated HS2 railway?
Opposition politicians love to make promises they hope will be forgotten, but Truss was not in opposition. She was a member of a government that spent its way through a pandemic lockdown with panache – and grotesque waste. She now means to spend as much as the government did on lockdown to excuse corporate profiteering. Meanwhile, she still has 25,000 migrants crossing the Channel this year alone. She has 60,000 court cases idle and overdue for a hearing. She has 6.8 million people waiting for hospital treatment, and an NHS the laughing stock of European healthcare.
Truss must use the pause in political warfare to get her ducks in a row. Her most immediate bind is clearly the economic war on Russia, which she is not winning. Did any western defence ministry predict – or even wargame – what Russia might do if the west tried to shut down its trade? As it is, sanctions have strengthened Putin’s paranoia and his resolve.
The shrewd ex-oligarch and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky suggested to an Intelligence Squared audience in London on Thursday that if the west had spent on weapons for Ukraine a fraction of what it must spend on energy subsidies, the war might now be over.
When peace does come, as one day it will, energy prices will collapse, Putin’s earnings will plummet and Europe’s cost of living crisis can subside. Meanwhile, Britain has no excuse for leaving big energy to gorge on its customers. Taxing it would be Truss’s most popular U-turn.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
