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The first thing Prime Minister Liz Truss needs to
do? U-turn on everything she believes in
Simon
Jenkins
She’s a small-state ideologue, but all that matters is
that she carries the UK through this economic crisis
Mon 5 Sep
2022 12.41 BST
Liz Truss
enters Downing Street tomorrow to face an economic emergency that is
unprecedented in peacetime. She will meet it, we are told, with £100bn of
public money, significantly more than what her predecessor, Boris Johnson,
spent on furlough during the Covid crisis. This will require a blatant U-turn
for a prime minister who spent the summer campaigning for office on a pledge of
no more such “handouts”. Yet brute necessity will be Truss’s handmaid. Energy
consumers, producers and retailers are screaming in agony. Thousands of small
businesses face bankruptcy. After 12 years of Tory government, Truss will be
forced to summon Labour’s state interventionism to her rescue.
On any
showing, this task will need superhuman powers of leadership. As it is, Truss
brings to office no mandate from any national electorate. She was chosen
neither by her fellow MPs nor by Tory voters, who variously preferred her
rival, Rishi Sunak, or for Johnson to stay in office. In the end, her
supporters numbered 81,326 among the Tory party membership, a group which is
majority elderly, well off and living in the south-east of England. She has
come through an attenuated leadership campaign with little credit to her name
beyond stamina. She has been gauche and lightweight in debate. Her policies
have seemed implausible, stitched together with cliches.
The crisis
may yet prove the making of Truss in the short term. It is largely the result
of Europe’s economic war on Russia and it cannot last for ever. Markets will
adjust and alternative sources of energy emerge. Vast exploitative profits are
being amassed deep in the energy sector and Truss’s reckless promise of no
windfall taxes cannot last. Pragmatism – and desperation – is guiding French
and German governments to radical innovations. Britain is merely late on the
scene, its energy policy scandalously left floundering for months.
To this
extent, the energy crisis could do for Truss what the Covid lockdown did for
Johnson. The nation will be hanging on her every word. Short-term generosity
with public money seldom did a prime minister any harm, and will offer her a
ready platform to parade her qualities of leadership. Provided she pursues her
past habit of adjusting her ideas to the prevailing wind, she may just come
through the next year with her standing enhanced.
The next
election is a different matter. Here Truss’s immature politics must evolve
fast. Her utterances have been those of a student politician on the make. She
wants to “rip up” Treasury orthodoxy and circumvent a “bureaucratic” civil
service. She wants lower taxes, lower spending, less emphasis on
“redistribution”. But mention any policy – defence, care homes, the NHS – and
she wants to spend more on it.
Whether
Truss emerges as principled or opportunistic, pragmatic or brittle, a unifier
or a divider does not matter much. What does matter to the country is that a
responsible government can carry the nation through this emergency. Party unity
demands that Truss establish some sort of coalition with Sunak and some of his
more able supporters. She shows no signs of going in that direction.
As it is,
an alarming burden will fall on the likely new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng. He
will find himself inevitably in contention not just with Truss and her court,
but with ministers clamouring for favours from his towering deficit. He must
plot her path through this emergency, as Sunak tried to plot Johnson’s. He is
the one to watch, holding the key to Tory fortunes at the next election.
Simon
Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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