Revenge
against the Tories: Liz Truss’ defeat symbolizes massive UK anti-Conservative
backlash
In a brutal
cull, some of the Conservative Party’s most prominent MPs were thrown out of
parliament by Brits fed up with years of chaos.
Liz Truss’
failure was also part of a wider pattern on election night that saw a
procession of senior party figures ejected from parliament. |
JULY 5, 2024 10:41 AM CET
BY JOHN JOHNSTON
It will go down as the moment that capped the worst of all
election nights for one of the world’s oldest — and most successful — political
parties.
As Britain’s Conservatives woke up to the full scale of
their humiliating defeat in the U.K. general election on Friday morning, news
emerged from a rural district in eastern England that former Prime Minister Liz
Truss had lost her seat in parliament.
In many ways, Truss’ ignominious exit is the perfect symbol
of this election.
She served as premier for just 45 disastrous days in 2022 —
the shortest tenure ever — before she was forced to resign after triggering a
market meltdown with her package of unfunded tax cuts. The economic
consequences are still being felt today.
Since leaving office, Truss has doubled down on her
hard-right “Reaganomics” agenda, written a book blaming the deep state for her
downfall and even endorsed Donald Trump to be the next U.S. president. Back
home, her party lost the right to be taken seriously as voters looked
elsewhere. Now it has lost power, too.
Truss’ failure was also part of a wider pattern on election
night that saw a procession of senior party figures ejected from parliament.
Her constituency was one of several previously “safe” Tory seats once held by
Conservative prime ministers that fell to opposition parties. Boris Johnson’s
former seat of Uxbridge in West London was won by the center-left Labour Party.
Theresa May’s seat of Maidenhead in Berkshire, west of the capital, fell to the
centrist Liberal Democrats — as did Witney, the wealthy Oxfordshire district
once held by David Cameron.
Even the late Margaret Thatcher’s north London constituency
of Finchley voted the Tories out and chose a Labour MP for the first time since
the Tony Blair era.
It was a bleak night for many Conservatives, including a
record number of senior ministers serving in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet.
Political
soap opera
The first big name to go was Grant Shapps, the defense
secretary, who had served at the highest level in multiple government roles
stretching back more than a decade.
He blamed his own party’s recent record of infighting for
putting voters off. The public, he said, were sick of the “endless political
soap opera” and the “internal rivalries and divisions” that warring
Conservatives have played out in public. “It’s not so much that Labour won this
election, but rather that the Conservatives have lost it,” said Shapps.
Penny Mordaunt, who had been tipped as a potential future
leader, also lost her seat in the Southern English coastal town of Portsmouth.
Her party, Mordaunt said, had “taken a battering.”
Lord President of the Council, Penny Mordaunt, carries the
Sword of State ahead of the coronations of Britain’s King Charles III. | Pool
photo by Victoria Jones/AFP via Getty Images
Mordaunt, who earned international fame carrying the sword
of state during King Charles’ coronation last year, warned Tories not to learn
the wrong lessons from their crushing defeat. Conservatives should not indulge
in “talking to an ever smaller slice of ourselves” but instead reconnect with
voters “if we want again to be the natural party of government.”
Five Tory
prime ministers in eight years
The Conservatives had been in power continuously since 2010
and they changed leader repeatedly, during a period of unprecedented turmoil
for the country.
After a relatively stable five years in coalition with the
Liberal Democrats, Cameron’s Tories won a surprise majority in 2015 and had no
choice but to deliver their election pledge on holding an “in-out” referendum
on Britain’s membership of the European Union. That unleashed a political civil
war that changed U.K. and European politics permanently.
In the eight years since the Brexit vote, there have been
five Tory prime ministers, along with scores of ministers first joining, then
being fired or resigning from government as the party lurched from scandal to
crisis and back again.
The senior Conservatives who lost their seats include: the
current Justice Secretary Alex Chalk; Chief Whip Simon Hart; Education
Secretary Gillian Keegan; former Trade Secretary Liam Fox; ex-Health Secretary
Thérèse Coffey; former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg.
In 1997, Tony Blair swept to power as Labour leader with a
landslide that Keir Starmer looks set to match. British voters weary of 18
years of Conservative rule back then still recall the cathartic moment when
Cabinet minister Michael Portillo lost his seat.
For millions now struggling with higher home loan repayments
after Truss’ disastrous mini-budget, a new chapter has been written in
Britain’s savage story of electoral revenge.
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