Within minutes of the announcement that she had made it to the final two in the Tory leadership contest in July, Liz Truss sent Tory MPs a message on social media.
“Thank you for putting your trust in me,” she tweeted. “I’m ready to hit the ground from day one.” Her post was quickly deleted and the word “running” was added in.
But her initial message could not have been more prescient.
Ever since she took over as prime minister just 38 days ago, Truss’s premiership has been hurtling downwards towards the hard earth of economic reality. She is now fighting for her political survival.
That is after a chaotic 24 hours during which Truss and her chancellor insisted publicly they were sticking to the plan not to put up corporation tax – even as officials were privately briefing the exact opposite.
Kwasi Kwarteng’s middle-of-the-night dash back from Washington confirmed the situation had reached crisis point. As the sun rose over Westminster, rumours he was about to be sacked were already spreading. One No 10 insider claimed Truss already knew she wanted him to “carry the can” over the mini-budget disaster – as he was telling reporters he wasn’t going anywhere.
Truss will be hoping that sacking Kwarteng as chancellor will take the heat off her, at the very least buying her some valuable time to try to steady the mutinous Tory ship. But as his departure letter – and her reply – showed, their radical plan to rip up the economy to boost growth was very much a joint endeavour.
Kwarteng stressed to the prime minister that it was “your” vision while she responded that “we share the same vision”.
Despite the finger-pointing, the pair have been on the same ideological journey for years, with the ill-fated budget fleshed out over coffee and biscotti in Kwarteng’s Greenwich home way back in August.
While it may appear surprising that Truss didn’t see this moment coming, even her closest allies admit that she has been so focused on implementing her plan that she was blind to the concerns of many Tory MPs, who warned that not only was it “fantasy economics”, but that she didn’t have the mandate to do it.
Her decision to appoint Jeremy Hunt, an experienced minister widely regarded as a safe pair of hands at Westminster, as Kwarteng’s replacement at the Treasury should, in theory, help her cling onto power at least until the Halloween fiscal statement where she can set out the government’s longer term plans for the economy.
But even with Hunt onboard, her premiership is in serious peril.
The decision to stick with Rishi Sunak’s plan to put up corporation tax from 19% to 25% will raise £18bn a year, but leaves 55% of the tax cuts going ahead and a big fiscal black hole still to be filled, presumably by hefty – and unpopular – cuts to public spending.
Her authority has already been critically undermined by two major U-turns, on the 45p top rate of income tax and corporation tax, as well as the departure of her chancellor, while despite everything she continues to stick by the rest of her plan for growth.
Tory MPs, fewer than a third of whom supported her in the final round of the leadership contest, are in no mood to come to her defence after a reshuffle that favoured loyalists. The Tories have slumped to a record low in the polls and some are weighing up whether even the nuclear option of ousting her would be an improvement.
Plotting is already under way at Westminster and set to intensify with a nexus of senior former ministers ready to push for the party rules to be scrapped and a “unity” candidate, probably in the form of Rishi Sunak, who has been watching the chaos unfurl from the sidelines, taking over.
Rebel MPs will hit the phones over the weekend to establish the scale of support for telling her to go next week. If she survives that, the weeks ahead are littered with moments of great peril.
At her Downing Street press conference, Truss repeatedly stressed the public wanted stability. Yet her MPs know that just as Boris Johnson had shredded any reputation they had for integrity, she has done it for economic competence. Within minutes of it ending, Tories were texting to complain she had only made matters worse.
The pressure for a general election will only increase – with the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and the Liberal Democrats all calling for one on Friday, arguing that the damage Truss has inflicted on the Tory party is a lesser concern to the damage she has, and could yet, inflict on the country.
One Tory MP who has backed her since the start of the leadership contest says: “Her authority is shattered and discipline has totally broken down. It might be two years until the next election but I don’t see how she can get through it. It feels like it’s game over.”
The days ahead will determine whether Truss can pull her premiership back – and her party back – from the brink of political oblivion.
