Boris Johnson’s resignation in July was the very opposite of a national tragedy. But Liz Truss’s departure on Thursday was a moment of national farce. Never has a prime minister been less suited to the job than she was. Never has a resignation been more needed by the country. Having boasted that she was not a quitter, Ms Truss threw in the towel a day later. The about-turn was par for the course for the most belligerently incompetent British prime ministership in modern, and perhaps any other, times. She departs humiliated, after 45 days, the shortest serving prime minister in British history. But she deserved to go.
Ms Truss’s Downing Street announcement followed a torrid 24 hours of Conservative mayhem, unmistakably the death throes of a collapsing regime. The then home secretary, Suella Braverman, was sacked after an argument about looser immigration controls. Conservative MPs were then reduced to dismayed disarray over how to vote on a Labour motion against fracking. After that, it was simply a matter of time. On Thursday, the backbench 1922 Committee chair, Sir Graham Brady, went to No 10 to say that the game was up for Ms Truss’s inept and tin-eared leadership.
In her brief tenure, Ms Truss proved that she lacked the skills to lead. Her judgments and her tone were almost always wrong. Elected by party members without the backing of Tory MPs, she took her victory as a partisan mandate. She exiled the majority of MPs, more of whom had supported Rishi Sunak than her, from her government before being forced to bring some of them back too late. In a Downing Street where neoliberal ideologues and thinktanks were given free rein, she slashed taxes for the rich – a shocking move that proved a deserved economic and political disaster. A run on the pound, a lurch in the bond market and an emergency intervention by the Bank of England followed. Confidence in Conservative economic management collapsed and the opinion polls tanked.
None of this, however, will end the ferment and factionalism consuming the Tory party. There has been talk of MPs coalescing around a compromise unity candidate to succeed Ms Truss – Theresa May spoke up for this approach on Thursday. But the Tories appear too far gone in disunity and rivalry for a stitch-up like that to work. The early signs are that several serving and former ministers will try again, as in July. New rules, requiring 100 nominations, have been set so that Tory members can be pressed not to overturn the MPs’ preferred leader a second time. But there will be some candidates, possibly (but disgracefully if so) including an unrepentant Mr Johnson, who will want members to have the final say. It is entirely possible that, next week, the Tory party will inflict a Truss 2.0 on the country.
Such an outcome would be terrible for the Tory party and British democracy, and catastrophic for Britain. The party would feel unleadable and the country ungovernable. The markets might take fright, especially if there was yet another change of chancellor. But it would be the public, already suffering a battering on costs and budgets, and with record numbers dependent on food banks, who would suffer most. That is why, in the end and sooner rather than later, the true solution to the crisis in the Tory party is an early general election. Only a new government with a new mandate can give the British people the fresh start that they need and deserve.
