A Truss administration is already doomed

By Pete North - July 21, 2022

I always assumed it would end up as a Truss/Sunak run off and I assume Truss will win it because, unlike the other candidates, she is not actively loathed by one of the factions. She is not respected or taken seriously, and the words “hopelessly out of her depth” seem to be a recurrent theme among anyone who’s ever worked with her. But she does have the merit of not being Rishi Sunak or Penny Mordaunt and that’s the best compromise the party can come up with. As with Johnson, she really is the best they have to offer. This is at least consistent with the downward trend where each PM manages somehow to be worse than the last. We’re seemingly in a race to the bottom.

This does not bode well for the Tory party since as soon as Truss takes up office, the clock starts ticking on her premiership, and it’s a certain she won’t see out a full term even if she can scrape an election win. She doesn’t have the gravitas or the personal authority to cling on to power. She’ll be weak from the outset and won’t enjoy a honeymoon period for very long – if at all.

At that point, the Tories really are in deep shit. All of the Tory big dogs are tainted and nearly all of them have taken the shot and flunked out. We could see Badenoch back for a second try, but this latest round of Tory infighting reveals a party that can’t possibly unite. In the final ballot of MPs, no candidate secured a clear endorsement. The strength of Truss’s membership endorsement will really only be a measure of how detested Sunak is. Neither wing of the Tories can live with the other.

In that respect Truss is a band aid to stop the party falling apart. But fall apart it will. Sooner if Sunak somehow wins. The one-nation Tories want to drag the party back to the centre, while the right of the party is hungry for some proper red meat. These divisions cannot be bridged. Johnson could contain the bickering because, while he was an election winner, MPs owed their cushy lifestyles to him. They owe nothing to a caretaker leader.

Though the polls are giving Starmer a clear lead, I still don’t think Labour can swing it at the next election. We haven’t yet been through the campaing process where we take a serious look at the alternative to see if it is yet deserving of power. Weak governments can cling on to power if the opposition isn’t ready – and it isn’t. The Labour party has problems of its own.

Thus, we are racing towards a crunch point where neither party is capable of uniting or leading the country, with neither party enjoying an outright mandate and elections decided by the stay-at-home apathy vote. The party system cartel ensures that nobody else gets a look in, so we are lumbered with morally and intellectually spent organisations that don’t really know what they stand for and have no vision for the country.

We are then left to wonder how long before the system collapses. How long can the country tolerate a broken and sclerotic political system – and what will it take to remove it? I suppose we’ll know the answer to that soon if the energy situation continues to deteriorate. We may scrape through this winter (I hope), but there isn’t the resilience in the economy to cope with worsening prices.

The consensus among the pundits is that Britain is now a stagnant economy, and the prognosis is not good. There have been some tough decisions to make about spending, borrowing and energy policy but successive administrations have ducked the issues in an attempt to avoid unpopular decisions – ensuring the fallout is worse than it ever needed to be. There are questions over health, social care, elderly care, interest rates and energy that just can’t wait any longer. If politicians won’t make a decision then fate will decide for them.

Liz Truss is currently making her pitch to woo the Tory party, making promises she probably can’t keep. She “vows” to ditch green levies on energy, but to do that will prove difficult if the activist blob moves takes the government to court. These levies are a result of treaty obligations and removing them, like removing illegal immigrants, means going up against the blob.

There’s no reason to believe Truss can or will pick a fight. She’s already signed up to the Conservative Environment Network pledge to maintain Net Zero, and even if she wanted to row back on it, she doesn’t have the political capital or the party unity to make the legislative changes. Consequently, the grudging endorsement she has from the right of the party will soon evaporate. She’s finished before she’s even started. A winter of skyrocketing bills and another summer of dinghy invaders will slam shut the coffin lid on the Tories. Ms Truss’s fate is already sealed.