Can Truss repair the damage of her first four weeks?

Soon after being elected Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith summed up a test that he was soon to fail. ‘At the moment, I am a clean slate,' he said. 'It’s the next four months that count. If the wrong colours are applied to my slate, they will be there for ever. I have to be able to show in the first few months that my strengths are the dominant features, so that people will say, “That bloke looks as though he knows where he’s going.”’ William Hague, he said, never recovered from the baseball cap incidents. Early slips, he said, are fatal.

Three or four months is a luxurious timetable. In an era where social media is Britain’s No. 1 source of written news, the whole process is accelerated. The great fear stalking the Tory party now is that, after three of four weeks, Liz Truss's position is already unrecoverable. Not because her 'fiscal event' was so dramatic (cutting the tax burden to 2021 levels is hardly supply-side shock therapy) or because the agenda is wrong. As the Sunday Telegraph's leader argues today, she has barely started to make her case. But if she can't explain articulate what she's doing, her enemies will.

Failure to explain her case to the markets, and their caustic reaction, means that the Kwasi Kwarteng 'fiscal event' now joins a handful of dramas to have given the opposition a ten-point jump in the polls. You don’t see graphs like the below very often: and remember our tracker shows an average of six polls, not one rogue poll.

Things can change. Hardly anyone gave David Cameron a realistic chance of a majority in 2015. As we argue in the leading article of The Spectator, the pound ended up as one of the few currencies in the world to rise against the dollar in the seven days after the 'fiscal event' was delivered. But the markets and economy recovered for John Major and this didn’t help him because of Iain Duncan Smith’s point: after Black Wednesday, the public had made up their mind about his government's competence (or lack thereof). 

Polls show most Brits blame the Tories for the mortgage rate rises. Unfairly so: I’d say 80 per cent of the economic damage would have happened anyway, as rates rose worldwide, but that’s politically irrelevant if most voters already give the Tories 100 per cent of the blame. Labour's message is simple: "Their tax cuts for the rich spooked the markets and sent rates soaring". The Truss message is harder to discern. The 'fiscal event' was calamitously put in the diary at the same week that rates rose worldwide. Her failure to build around her an experienced team (she could have used a proven campaign-winner like Matthew Elliot) meant there was no one to point out the trap they were walking into. After which voters made up their minds - and it took three or four weeks, not the IDS four months.

The figures for approval ratings for Prime Ministers shows a downwards-trending zigzag. They start high, with decent political capital, which they go on to spend. Truss starts in negative territory Some emotional evolutions are a one-way process. Byron once observed that that friendship may, and often does, grow into love – but love never subsides into friendship. A version of this is true for politics. Enthusiasm about a new party leader may – and often does – slide into despair. But despair never really turns into enthusiasm.

Above is the Ipsos Mori poll that we track at The Spectator due to its consistency but YouGov also run regular net approval polls which show her at minus 60. Opinium puts it at minus 47. Which would be off the scale (the above chart only goes down to minus 40). The surveys are not directly comparable and I’d hesitate to draw too much judgement until things have settled and the next Ipsos Mori drops. But it doesn’t look very good.

The economy might turn around, but as Major found out, Prime Ministerial approval ratings tend not to. And that, in turn, express itself as general election results. If today’s polls were tomorrow’s election result, what would that show us? Electoral Calculus has done the crude calculation: the Tories going from 356 MPs to 85 and Labour from 198 MPs to a clear majority of 471. A majority big enough to change the voting system and lock the Tories out of power for a generation.

This is all the worse because it follows the decision of a few dozen MPs to depose a Prime Minister that 13 million people had elected – then spend the summer staging a needlessly-protracted and often-solipsistic leadership contest. The Tories needed to prove to a bemused public that they put the country through this drama because they had a seriously better option. Instead, this looks like government by spasm.

We live in a period of chronic unpredictability, with pollsters regularly confounded and great political escapes regularly pulled off.  Truss may yet get better results than the City predicct and she may yet take the Sunday Telegraph's advice and actually make her case. Politics, after all, is making and winning arguments. But she fails to do so, then the mould will set on the above opinion polls, and the Tories really will be cooked.