Liz Truss is clearly ready to fight for her vision – the problem is, her party isn’t
During what may yet turn out to have been only the first Conservative leadership contest of 2022, Liz Truss was extremely careful to position herself as the continuity candidate to Boris Johnson. That display of apparent loyalty was to prove pivotal with many party members when they selected her over the Johnson assassin, Rishi Sunak. Yet as Truss’s first month as prime minister has now shown, she is not the continuity Johnson candidate at all. Instead she glories in being a radical disrupter.
This was evident from day one, when Truss appointed a cabinet overwhelmingly from the Tory right, while banishing prominent ministers of the Johnson era. It became explosively obvious two weeks later, when Kwasi Kwarteng slashed taxes on the rich, setting off the chain of events that has transformed British party politics and left the Tory party’s ratings in tatters. On Wednesday, it was starkly confirmed in Truss’s party conference speech in Birmingham – a defiant address that contained no mention of Johnson whatever, let alone any endorsement of his policies.
On the day of her leadership victory a month ago, Truss said she had campaigned as a Conservative and would now govern as a Conservative. It’s the kind of platitude that new leaders often spout. But the Tory party that heard those words must have thought it implied some degree of continuity with the recent past.
It did not. In Truss’s mouth, the words implied what she had always intended them to mean: a decisive shift to the Thatcher/Reagan economic right of the kind that has long been the dream of the party’s free-market thinktanks, but is fundamentally at odds with Johnson’s messy, big-government pragmatism.
Truss’s speech was an unapologetic confirmation that this is what we
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