Liz Truss was never likely to make a good prime minister and it is too late now for her to be an ordinarily bad one. Her reputation cannot withstand the damage already inflicted on Britain’s economy. A course correction on fiscal policy might bring temporary market stability, but it will take new leadership to restore confidence that there is sound judgment at the heart of government.
Making a scapegoat of Kwasi Kwarteng convinces no one. The chancellor has been sacrificed to appease critics of a mini-budget that gave expression to the will of the prime minister. Appointing Jeremy Hunt as Mr Kwarteng’s successor brings experience but not coherence to the government. If Mr Hunt calls the economic shots, the prime minister is redundant. If he doesn’t, chaos will continue.
It was Ms Truss who had the wrong plan, at the wrong time, introduced in the wrong way. Long after it was clear to everyone outside Downing Street that her ideological prescriptions were poison, she was defending them with dogmatic condescension. The scale of the original error, magnified by the uncomprehending follow-up, disqualifies her from office. A terse press conference on Friday, devoid of contrition, served only to prove that Ms Truss is incapable of improvement.
Most Conservative MPs would be rid of her tomorrow if they could agree on a way to do it that wouldn’t make their predicament even worse, by which they mean avoiding a contest that might promote someone even less suitable than Ms Truss.
There is also concern that a replacement would face an immediate crisis of legitimacy. There are ways to arrange a succession, bypassing a ballot of Tory members, but the case for a general election would then be overwhelming. Few Tory MPs feel safe enough in their seats to relish that prospect.
The problem of a threadbare mandate is an issue already. The unwritten rules of British democracy allow for changes of prime minister without nationwide electoral ratification, but the legitimacy of a government thus installed demands humility in recognising that power is derived from a parliamentary majority won on a particular manifesto. Ms Truss’s maverick budget adventure defied that principle. She embarked on a destructive course with a revolutionary zeal that had no democratic basis.
The dangers inherent in this situation are evident to rational Tory MPs, many of whom recognise that regime change is fast becoming a matter of national urgency, trumping any question of what it means for the party. Having witnessed the harm that Ms Truss can do to Britain in just a few weeks, it is hard to make the case for waiting and seeing what might happen if she stays in the job for years.
That is the patriotic case for action. It happens also to be true that the Conservative party’s self-interest is served by swiftly disposing of its current leadership. Ms Truss’s fundamentalist libertarian ideology has been stress-tested and broken by the very force it venerates as a supreme authority – the market. Her credentials and her creed could hardly be more comprehensively demolished. There are other strains of Conservatism and traditions in the party worth salvaging from the ruin of Ms Truss’s project. That is a task to be undertaken in opposition, which is clearly now the proper place for the Tories, as its more honourable MPs and supporters must realise.
