Tory jitters about Truss: ‘She will just come
across as Boris without the charm’
As Starmer leads in polls for best PM, Lib Dems have
formed attack unit to push for victory in blue wall seats
Toby Helm
Sat 20 Aug
2022 20.30 BST
With just
two weeks to go before Liz Truss is expected to be crowned as the new Tory
leader and prime minister, a large number of Conservative MPs are suffering a
serious bout of the jitters about their own futures this weekend.
One reason
is that while a clear majority of the 150,000 or so members of the Tory party,
who have the ultimate say in deciding the next PM, are opting for Truss over
Rishi Sunak, voters out in the country seem distinctly unimpressed by the
prospect of the current foreign secretary moving into No 10.
Team Truss
may be metaphorically measuring up the Downing Street curtains – but current
polling trends of the wider electorate, as opposed to the tiny Tory
“selectorate”, suggest her stay there could be even shorter than that of her
recently ousted predecessor.
“It is
quite worrying,” says a former minister. “Members are going one way with Liz,
the country at large, the other.”
This
weekend’s poll by Opinium for the Observer gives Labour its biggest lead in
many months. It also shows that Truss has, in the last fortnight, slipped well
behind Keir Starmer when voters are asked who would make the best prime
minister.
Starmer
appears to have finally struck a chord with the electorate with his plan, first
revealed in last Sunday’s Observer, to freeze energy prices this autumn. Two
weeks ago, Truss had a one-point lead over Starmer in the “best PM” stakes.
Today she is eight points behind him.
On
Saturday, Michael Gove joined other senior Conservatives such as Dominic Raab
and Michael Howard in denouncing Truss’s core economic policy as a “holiday
from reality”, as he came out instead for Sunak. The former Tory chancellor Ken
Clarke, interviewed in the Observer New Review, dismisses Truss’s tax plans as
“nonsense” and says they will stoke inflation at the worst possible time.
Labour now
senses one of those rare political turning points, the potential beginning of
the end of its 12-year period in opposition. Its strategists say the last week
has been the best since Starmer became leader. A senior member of the Starmer
inner circle told the Observer that “this was a week in which political battle
lines were drawn – most obviously for the coming weeks but more subtly for the
years to come.”
The likes
of Gove seem to sense the same movement of what John Prescott once described as
the political “tectonic plates”. He and Raab appear to believe that Truss has
catastrophically failed to grasp both the extent of the cost of living crisis
and the dire political consequences for her party of inaction to address it.
Gove said
yesterday in an article for the Times that “the answer to the cost of living
crisis cannot be simply to reject further ‘handouts’ and cut tax” – milder than
Raab’s attack on her economic policies as an “electoral suicide note” – but a
damning condemnation nonetheless.
It is not
just Labour that now feels Truss will be good news for the party. The Liberal
Democrats have formed a new “Truss attack unit” believing they can repeat a
recent string of byelection victories over the Tories in scores of blue wall
seats at the next general election, in those constituencies where they are the
main challengers to the Conservatives.
Notably, in
many of these seats – including Raab’s in Esher and Walton where the deputy PM
had a majority of just 2,743 over the Lib Dems in 2019 – the incumbent MPs are
coming out in support of Sunak, not Truss.
The new Lib
Dem unit has already begun drafting Truss attack ads for distribution in these
areas, focusing on her failure to help people with soaring energy bills and
“blue on blue” clashes in the leadership contest.
The Lib
Dems believe liberal Tories will also dislike Truss’s criticisms of “woke”
civil servants, her conversion to the “benefits of Brexit” having been a
Remainer at the 2016 referendum, and her new-found green scepticism, including
a recently stated dislike of solar panels in rural areas.
Parts of
the country where the Lib Dem attack unit will focus are the Home Counties – Surrey,
Sussex, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Kent – as well as seats further
afield in Devon and Shropshire.
Organisations
backing cooperation between progressive parties to oust the Tories sense that
Truss offers real opportunities. Neal Lawson, spokesman for the Win as One
campaign, which encourages progressive alliances on the left, said: “Many Tory
seats in the blue wall are on a knife edge and a rightwing Truss leadership
could push them over the edge. This is specially the case where there are more
progressive voters who could well align to back the best placed non-Tory if
they shift further to the right.”
Among more
liberal, often Remainer, one nation Tories who are now backing Sunak there are
two remaining sources of hope. The first is that polls of Tory members which
have given Truss huge leads over recent days somehow turn out to have been
wrong. The Sunak camp seems sincerely to believe that the evidence from the
ground shows the race to be far tighter than these polls of members suggest. One
cabinet minister backing Sunak said he believed the former chancellor still had
a one in three chance of winning and that the trend was clearly in Sunak’s
direction.
The other
hope is that if Truss does win, she will dump much of the agenda outlined in
her campaign, and cast aside the rightwing supporters she is said to be
considering appointing to high positions.
A former
cabinet minister who is backing Sunak said the test would be what Truss does
when she gets into Downing Street, not what she has said on the campaign trail.
“If she carries on with full-on culture wars and the anti-woke stuff, as well
as the economic stuff, she will just come across as Boris without the charm,”
he said. “Then she will turn off people in the blue wall. If she appoints
Nadine Dorries and John Redwood to top jobs people will just drift away.
“The
sensible thing to do is what most successful US presidents have done, which is
to campaign for your base, and then govern from the centre. She would be very
well advised to do that. The trouble is no one seems know whether she will. That
is the worry.”
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