So Liz Truss, you’ve had your election, now let us have ours.
Truss won the Tory leadership race over Rishi Sunak by presenting herself to party members as a 21st century Maggie Thatcher, right down to the tax-cutting pledges and the penchant for posing in tanks.
But she has become Prime Minister by default and the people of the country need to have their say. Truss won with less than 50 per cent support from the eligible-to-vote Tory party members.
Tory MPs didn’t want her, as was clear in the early stages of the election process. Just 50 of them, less than a seventh of Tory party in the Commons, voted for her in the first round.
Certainly the country didn’t want her as was apparent from a slew of polls and the reflex stretch for the TV zapper whenever she appeared on television.
This is a Prime Minister with precious little popular support beyond right-wing Tory activists, facing an energy crisis that could leave the nation badly divided when it needs to be united.
Liz Truss’s popular touch is about as warm as the switched-off radiators in thousands of homes across the country.
According to the polls, just 21 per cent of voters “like” her and only 12 per cent think she will make a good leader. But somehow, by an arcane and unrepresentative process, she will today become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. All because she won support from 81,326 out-of-touch Tory members.
It is a nonsense that she has become Prime Minister with such an obvious lack of public support.
In her acceptance speech Truss declared 2024 to be the year of the next general election. But that just won’t wash.
The Tories cannot just keep changing leaders whenever they feel like it and expect the country to just politely comply.
Truss made no effort to even address the public during the seemingly interminable leadership campaign, preferring to pander to her party’s base.
She avoided the scrutiny of the media, dodged interviews and has been so guarded with her plans to deal with the energy crisis that she has been left shopping for an off-the-shelf solution devised by Labour and pumped up by the energy companies.
She may prove everyone wrong and pivot out towards the public, but her ambition for power meant she appealed to a narrow section of her own party – and nobody else.
Her main big idea is a dubious and extremely risky experiment in cutting taxes to spark growth.
This is a policy that leaves serious economic experts warning of hyper-inflation and a public spending squeeze.
It would give the rich who don’t need it a big boost in their pay packets – while doing nothing to help the vast majority of workers.
If Truss’s medicine is swallowed by the Treasury it could be economic Armageddon for the UK, already hammered by Brexit and Covid.
Like an out of tune piano Truss’s trademark awkwardness was on display even in her stilted victory speech.
Desperate applause lines went in search of cheering responses and were met with an echoing silence in the huge hall hired for the event.
She heaped praise on Boris Johnson as someone admired “from Kyiv to Carlisle”, which was to invite an obvious response that he and the Tories have little support north of the border.
It was another line met with no applause, showing how out of step Truss is even with her party.
But it had a ring of truth to it as there was never much affection for the Etonian liar in Scotland.
But at least Johnson had a mandate from the electorate across the UK.
Liz Truss knows, and we know, that the Tories are despised across most of Scotland.
She flies to Scotland today to visit the Queen at Balmoral – where she will be formally asked by the monarch to form a government.
It may be it’s one of the very few homes in Scotland where she will be given a warm welcome.
For up to this point she seems to have precious little to say that offers a positive message to Scottish voters. In fact, she seems hell-bent on creating division and discord between Westminster
and Holyrood.
Her only policy for Scotland seems to be a war of words with Nicola Sturgeon and an outright refusal to contemplate demands for a second referendum.
At some stage this new Prime Minister has to be able to build a case for the United Kingdom based on more than the word “no”. Before that she has to immediately find the button marked ‘emergency’ and pull the lever on immediate economic support for people facing a winter fuel crisis.
That should be her first and last move as Prime Minister. Truss is in office, but without a moral mandate to rule.
When the knives were out for Boris Johnson his supporters tried to claim that his mandate came from the people.
When Gordon Brown did not go for his own election when he replaced Tony Blair, the Tories were scathing to the dying days of his administration.
This is a time of crisis, and instead of new leadership we have a re-hashed Tory government veering of to the right.
Truss does not represent renewal, she is a lame replacement for Boris the clown.
It is time for REAL change and it is time for a general election now.
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