The spectacular fall of Liz Truss

Is Liz Truss the new Theresa May? A fortnight ago that question seemed unduly insulting to the Prime Minister. Now it seems unduly insulting to the Maybot, whose stage-dancing at Tory conference appears a triumph of liquid movement when compared to the curtsying of the Trussborg at royal audiences.

Clumsy is as clumsy does, and Truss is now in a class of her own when it comes to political miscalculation. At least it took May a year to get fully found out in that catastrophic general election campaign of 2017. Truss has managed it in little more than a month.

Seeking to impose the agenda of Gladstonian liberalism on the 21^st century UK economy – but with a dash of Reaganite fiscal daring thrown in for good measure and almost no mandate – has turned out to be both politically and economically unsustainable.

Support for the Government has simply collapsed in all key constituencies: the Red Wall, the Blue Wall and inside the boundaries of the old London Wall that once encircled the City of London too.

This afternoon’s press conference announcing the readoption of Rishi Sunak’s plan to raise corporation tax significantly and the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as the new Chancellor in place of Kwasi Kwarteng contained distinct echoes of May’s 'nothing has changed'. Truss’s equally laughable phrase was: 'The mission remains the same.'

That some Truss supporters should now be talking about 'the markets' as if they were some malicious instrument of her many political enemies – in much the same way that Corbynistas once did – shows how far and fast she has fallen. These markets are simply the collective sentiment of savers and the people they entrust their money to.

They judged that Truss was planning to borrow recklessly to further increase an already very large national debt. That she envisaged using even a small portion of these borrowings to facilitate a tax cut for those earning more than £150,000 a year told financiers – and voters alike – that they were dealing with a dogmatist and not a realist.

The lack of any prior political 'pitch-rolling' for the contents of such a bombshell mini-Budget told Tory MPs that this rookie combination of PM and chancellor was disastrous. Downing Street sources initially reacted to pressure for U-turns by suggesting that a majority of 70 meant now was the time to force through radical measures.

But that assumed all Conservative MPs were bound into an economic agenda that ran against the Johnson manifesto of 2019 and the Johnson-Sunak 'arms around the nation' approach taken in the Covid years. As Michael Gove and Grant Shapps made clear at Tory conference, they weren’t.

Neither was the electorate. Not the heavily-mortgaged swing voters staring at hugely higher mortgage repayments. Nor the final-salary pensioners, whose company funds were destabilised as bond yields soared. Nor the vast 'fair play' brigade of moderate and pragmatic people, who are at the very least sceptical of any approach that envisages taking from the poor to give to the rich.

Under first past the post, a governing party setting a strong course can sometimes get away with having the electorate ranged against it by a ratio of up to 60:40. But when that becomes 75:25, which is roughly where we are now, the project collapses.

That is what did for May in summer 2019 – a nine per cent vote share in the European parliamentary elections accompanied by general opinion poll scores in the low to mid 20s. She’d reached the end of the road. Failing to leave the EU on the date she had promised to do so by – and begging the EU for an 'extension' – underlined her total failure on her central policy challenge.

Dumping the financial strategy set out in last month’s mini-Budget – and specific flagship measures within it – means Truss has flunked that same basic viability test. Her chosen battleground was the economy: growth, growth and growth. And dynamic tax cuts were to be her primary instrument.

Given there are two years until a general election need be held – October 2024, before the clocks change, being a perfectly respectable time to ask voters to go to the polls – then there is a theoretical case to be made that Truss has time to recover.

Putin could be ousted, gas prices could fall – massively cutting the guesstimated cost of the energy package and creating more fiscal headroom – inflation could drop back, Labour could trip itself up, green shoots of growth could even start appearing. A degree of vindication could ensue. But this would all depend on Tory MPs being sufficiently invested in Trussonomics to bear the terribly bumpy interim. And most of them simply are not. Whether they are capable of rediscovering the kind of esprit de corps needed to give any leader a fighting chance at the next general election remains to be seen. But that leader surely will not now be Truss.

Like May before her, she finds it hard to talk to the nation at large, even admitting during the Tory leadership contest that she was 'not the slickest communicator'. Yet so much of politics is communication. William Gladstone changed public opinion through the power of his speech-making during his Midlothian Campaign. Ronald Reagan earned himself the moniker 'The Great Communicator'.

Many decades later, a British PM has tried synthesising their very different economic outlooks without preparing her own MPs for what she was about to unleash. She took that approach without persuading the British public she is worth following over arduous ground towards the sunlit uplands she claims to have detected.

She clings on for now – no doubt hoping to claw her way past George Canning’s 118 days and thereby avoid the ignominy of being remembered as the UK’s shortest-serving premier. She’s most unlikely to make it.