Good morning. It feels as if the Conservative leadership race has been going on forever at this point. The low hum of political drama has largely faded into the background, subsumed by reports of various economic and social crises. However, in just over two weeks the next prime minister of this country will be announced and with them will come a new(ish) government. The scales look tipped in favour of Liz Truss: a poll of Conservative party members for the Observer put her 22 points ahead of Rishi Sunak. I spoke to Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University, about what a Truss cabinet might look like and what her priorities might be. That’s right after the headlines.
Five big stories
Covid-19 | A dual-variant Covid vaccine manufactured by Moderna has been approved for the UK’s autumn booster programme.
Police | The IOPC has announced a review into how the Portuguese athlete Ricardo dos Santos has been repeatedly stopped by the Metropolitan police in the last two years. In the latest incident, Dos Santos was stopped by seven armed officers.
Farming | Up to £60m of food has been wasted because of labour shortages on UK farms, including at least £22m of fruit and vegetables this year alone.
Flooding | The Met Office has issued a yellow thunderstorm warning for most of the UK on Monday and Tuesday with the possibility of flash flooding, disruption to transport and power cuts.
Civil service | Ministers are planning to lower redundancy pay by a quarter at the same time as cutting 91,000 jobs from the civil service. Trade unions have warned that the government should prepare for industrial and legal action if it decides to go ahead with its proposal.
In depth: Who might join Truss at No10?
On 3 September either Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss will be posing outside the door of No 10, ready to start their tenure as the next leader of the UK. They will be inheriting a country barrelling towards a second recession in two years, a looming energy crisis this winter and escalating conflict in Ukraine. How would Truss tackle these colossal problems, and which MPs would she enlist to tackle them?
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1 Chancellor of the exchequer
A central part of Truss’s approach to economic policy is downsizing the state and putting more money into people’s pockets. Her tenure would see a significant departure from the kind of policies that were implemented under Rishi Sunak. The person who has stayed loyal to Truss and shares her vision is the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng. “He would certainly be a bold pick [for chancellor], because he is very much a small-state thinker as well,” Bale says.
To push Truss’s neoliberal Thatcherism, Kwarteng would likely focus on light-touch regulation that a Truss government will regard as essential for a global Britain to reap the benefits of Brexit. But a change of chancellor is not a given, Bale adds. “Some of Truss’s policies will likely spook the markets, and one way of counteracting that will be to keep the current chancellor [Nadhim Zahawi] in place.”
Ultimately, whatever big ideas Truss and her government might try to push through, policy will be informed by the state of the economy. “The chancellor will have to live in the real world,” Bale says. That might mean direct subsidies to help people handle the cost of living crisis. Promises of large tax cuts and scaling back government intervention are looking increasingly difficult to fulfil.
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2 Home secretary
Some continuation of the status quo in the Home Office is likely, with Truss, like Sunak, having committed to the plan to deport UK migrants to Rwanda. “Whether they will be any more successful at actually making that plan work is a very different matter,” Bale says.
One of the possible picks for home secretary is the work and pensions secretary, Thérèse Coffey, who has been a Truss backer from the start. Operationally, Coffey makes a lot of sense, but there is no indication that a Coffey Home Office will have more luck than Priti Patel in reducing immigration or implementing other policies. “When it comes to immigration, the secret story of the last two or three years has been the fact that the Conservative government has run a relatively liberal immigration policy in many respects,” Bale explains. “They haven’t necessarily reduced immigration. European migrants to this country are being replaced by migrants from other parts of the world, especially south Asia, in particular into higher-skilled roles.” Regardless of who is running the Home Office then, balancing election pledges of lower numbers with a laissez-faire approach to certain kinds of migrants (richer ones from outside Europe) will be a line the Conservatives will likely try to toe.
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3 Foreign secretary
While Liz Truss has been described by many as a political chameleon, she has been steadfast in her views about foreign policy. “I think the Truss government will be Johnson on steroids in some ways when it comes to foreign policy,” Bale says. He predicts that she will likely pick another hawkish figure, such as the chairman of the foreign affairs committee, Tom Tugendhat, who also has taken a hardline stance on China and is in favour of interventionist policies and higher defence spending.
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4 Will the next government be a winner?
Politics is fickle and fast-moving, so predicting the future can be futile. However, any Conservative government has an uphill battle at the next election. Tory MPs did not overwhelmingly back Liz Truss, and it is no secret that divided parties don’t do well during elections. While Truss is significantly more popular than Sunak with the Tory membership, this could be her undoing in the long run if she does win the leadership vote. “Just as there was an underrating of Truss before the contest began, we are perhaps beginning to see an overrating of Truss as the contest has proceeded,” says Bale.
This pendulum swing reminds Bale of when Theresa May became prime minister in 2016. “She was going to be the new Thatcher: people were going to unite around her, people supposedly admired her very direct style, her honesty, her authenticity – but it all fell apart very quickly,” he says. “And I suspect, or at least I fear, that might be the case with Truss as well.” It’s impossible to know where the country will be in two years when the next general election is expected to take place, and what kind of political landscape it could take place in. However, it is obvious that if Liz Truss becomes the next prime minster, regardless of what her cabinet looks like she has a mammoth task ahead.
What else we’ve been reading
I loved Rachael Healy’s Edinburgh fringe-adjacent piece on comics who perform in second languages. Read on to find out why you have to be “100 times funnier in Danish”, according to Sofie Hagen. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters
Writers are cheap scapegoats for regimes under threat, writes Margaret Atwood after the stabbing of The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie. Her tribute to this “free-speech hero” is also a bracing call to action to defend democratic principles at a time when they are in danger. Craille Maguire Gillies, production editor, newsletters
Adele’s in Elle! The singer gets candid with interviewer Emma Carmichael about cancelled shows, therapy, and finding love. Hannah
It’s a year since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, and photojournalist Stefanie Glinski has been documenting life in the country – from the economic crisis to attacks on schools. Her images and reporting offer a glimpse of the chaos, fear and colossal changes. Craille
“Dating app evangelist” and Guardian journalist Alex Mistlin has been on a whopping 20 first dates this year. As Tinder turns 10, Mistlin explains why – despite being a swiping devotee – even he has quit the app. Hannah
Sport
Basketball | Lawyers for the American basketball star Brittney Griner have appealed against her nine-year Russian jail sentence for drug possession. The formal appeal suggests that no deal for a prisoner swap has been reached between Russia and the US.
Tennis | Andy Murray has beaten Stan Wawrinka, 7-6(3), 5-7, 7-5, during the Western and Southern Open in Cincinnati.
Football | Liverpool has had a stalled start to the Premier League season, drawing with Crystal Palace 1-1. Darwin Nunez was given a red card for head-butting Joachim Andersen on his full debut.
The front pages
“‘Job cuts on the cheap’: ministers accused as civil servants face sack”. That’s this morning’s Guardian front-page lead. The Mirror has “Dying mum’s plight – heartbreaking reality of energy bills crisis”. The Daily Mail says “Air chaos to hit half term” – that’s after the Heathrow passenger cap was extended. The Telegraph’s splash is “Royal Navy backs out of migrant patrols”. “Truss: I will fight off bid to split union” – the Express on Scottish independence rumblings. “New Omicron jab to fight autumn Covid wave” – the bivalent vaccine targets the variant explains the i. Top story in the Financial Times is “China cuts lending rate as retail sales and factory output decline”. The Sun has “£52m Man City ace on trial – Mendy ‘raped three women in 24 hrs’”. The Metro’s headline, all in quotation marks to reflect that these are allegations, is “‘Man City star a sex predator’”.
Today in Focus
Why is England so vulnerable to droughts?
Half of England is in a drought but the culprit is not just climate change. Helena Horton reports
Cartoon of the day | Brian Adcock
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Anne-Marie Newland illustrated the notion that there is always something new to learn – about yourself and the world – when she retrained as a security guard at 66. In an interview for the Guardian’s A new start after 60 series, she tells Paula Cocozza about working as a choreographer for Vangelis’s dancers, drumming for Toyah, teaching yoga and then turning from “yoga mat to the security tabard”, saying: “It is all about psychology. You have to be very observant. You have to be willing to challenge, without being aggressive.” Even more interesting, though, is her life along the way, from being born in Iraq, seeing her father, a political prisoner, being arrested at gunpoint, to growing up in “abject poverty” in Hertfordshire, raising four children and exploring careers in the arts and beyond.
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
