Conservative commentators are beginning to turn against Liz Truss, with rightwing newspapers such as the Sun and Daily Mail rounding on her for making a “pig’s ear” of the mini-budget, while other observers suggest her premiership could be extremely short-lived.
Though she was initially heralded by some as a prime minister to drive through true-blue policies with the most radical reforms in decades, unease is growing in Tory circles about her leadership.
Recent market turmoil, a series of screeching U-turns and the expectation more will follow are compounding jitters about Truss’s future.
The Daily Mail, in its editorial on Thursday, reserved the top slot in its three-pronged editorial column to savage the Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, but used the second to raise concerns about Truss. It said her “dash for growth is already limping badly after she made a pig’s ear of presenting her ambitious mini-budget and was forced into humiliating U-turns”.
Though critical of her leadership, the Mail, which endorsed Truss during the leadership contest, did say the principle of tax cuts and pursuance of growth was the right one and urged Tory rebels to get behind it.
Emblazoned across the rest of the page was a comment piece by its columnist Stephen Glover. One extract read: “In her abject powerlessness she is like a leader who has been in office for years and has run out of options and support. But she has only just started! And she has a majority of nearly 70.”
Meanwhile the Sun, which did not endorse either Truss or Rishi Sunak, used its editorial on Thursday to go after the new prime minister.
While it admitted “global forces are in play” and also harangued Threadneedle Street for “mixed messages”, the paper said Truss “fuelled the chaos by claiming no government spending will be cut”, asking: “How, then, can she balance the books?”
In a final riposte, the leader added: “The mayhem is terrifying. Markets crave stability and confidence. Ours have neither.”
Criticism also came from the Financial Times, which said Truss had presided over “Britannia Unhinged” – a reference to the book titled Britannia Unchained she wrote with Kwasi Kwarteng and other free-market backbenchers in 2012.
And the Economist said in a thundering editorial this week that Truss “blew up her own government”, and the few days she had in power that were not spent mourning the Queen’s death meant her honeymoon period had “the shelf-life of a lettuce”.
In addition to the scorn poured on Truss by the national press, the editor of an influential website within the Tory party – Conservative Home – said there were doubts about whether the mini-budget could survive at all.
Paul Goodman told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I am beginning to wonder whether or not ministers and Conservative MPs are capable of putting together a package of public spending cuts on the scale required. And if they do, whether they’re going to be acceptable to the markets, or whether the markets are now going to demand the withdrawal, in effect, of the mini-budget, or most of it, that Kwasi Kwarteng announced only very recently.”
Goodman said “all sorts of different people are talking about all sorts of different things because the Conservative backbenchers are casting around for a possible replacement for Kwasi Kwarteng, even for a possible replacement for Liz Truss” – mentioning that Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, Boris Johnson, Kit Malthouse and Sajid Javid’s names had been touted.
He added: “I have to say I’m not very enthusiastic about this kind of idea myself, nor am I enthusiastic about the prospects of the Conservative party junking what would be its fourth leader in seven years.”
One of the key economists Truss touted during the leadership contest, Gerard Lyons, also said on Thursday that while markets were in a febrile state before the mini-budget, “that clearly has contributed to a lot of the problems”.
He told Times Radio: “The mini-budget itself shouldn’t have been a mini-budget, it should have been as it said on the tin, a fiscal statement, where they just clarified what the markets had discounted – namely, reversing the two planned tax increases in terms of corporation tax and national insurance … and also coming up with the energy levy.”
Lyons added that Kwarteng, in his Halloween medium-term growth plan, “needs to convince the market that their fiscal numbers add up”.
