There’s only one question to be asked about British Prime Minister Liz Truss: Will she last till Christmas? The answer appears to be certainly not. In fact, she’ll be lucky to last through the next week or two. Historians are watching closely to see whether she will make it into the record books as the shortest-lived UK prime minister since 1759.
The Daily Mail has reported that British lawmakers will try to oust Truss this week despite Downing Street's warning that it could trigger a general election. More than 100 MPs belonging to the governing Conservative Party are ready to submit letters of no confidence in Truss to Graham Brady, the head of the Conservative Party's committee which organises the leadership contest, the tabloid reported, quoting unnamed sources, according to Reuters.
Even if Truss does manage to hang in there for more than two weeks, her absurd go-for-growth economic project is already being shredded by the hurriedly appointed new Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt. He was hastily called in and given the job late Friday. By Saturday morning, senior television correspondent Robert Peston tersely reported: “He has totally reset her economic programme.”
An amusing sidelight is that Hunt thought he was being pranked when Truss called to offer him the chancellorship. He’s from the party centre and holds very different economic views from Truss who’s on the extreme libertarian right.
It was always clear that Truss was a person driven by undiluted ambition that was not matched by ability. In the first stage of the leadership contest – a vote by Conservative MPs – she was a distant runner-up to former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak. But the vote then went to around 160,000 signed-up, mainly elderly, Conservative Party members around the country and here she scored a smashing victory.
It’s almost certain Sunak’s brown skin played a considerable part in Truss’s clear win. But Sunak had also been pushed onto the defensive because of his wife’s vast wealth. There’s probably never been a British politician before whose wife was richer than the Queen.
The Queen's last meeting
Truss took charge on September 6. Two days later, Queen Elizabeth died and a 10-day mourning period began, effectively shutting down the country till September 20 (Meeting Truss was the Queen’s last official act, prompting a rash of memes that the shock took an almost instant toll).
On September 23 – keep an eye on the dates because they show how quickly the Truss government began imploding – the new 6-ft-5-in Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng rose in Parliament to announce his mini-budget which cut tax for the biggest earners and offered virtually nothing for poorer Britons.
The market reaction was instantaneous and it was clear nobody was thrilled by the giveaways for the very rich. Rather, they asked awkward questions like how will the government balance its books. The pound plummeted to a 30-year-low, mortgage interest payments surged, and the bond market spiralled out of control – at one point it looked as if the all-important pension funds which dominate the market were in jeopardy.
'Markets will react...'
Kwarteng blithely dismissed the upheavals, saying: “markets will react as they will”. The Bank of England rescued the situation by stepping in and buying POUNDS STERLING 5 billion every day for 13 days. The bank’s moves brought some degree of calm back to the market – Kwarteng and Truss were still behaving like bystanders, convinced the chaos would calm down. One meme titled Kwasi Maths said: five plus minus 4 equals nine!
It was Truss’ bad luck that the Conservative Party annual conference was scheduled for the next week. Under normal circumstances, it should have been a coronation for the new Prime Minister. Instead, the news headlines were dominated by artillery fire from party dissidents and even her own ministers.
Former senior minister Michael Gove turned his fire on the ill-timed move to remove the 45 per cent tax band for top earners, saying: “I worry it is not in the Conservative tradition to have tax cuts on this scale, funded by borrowing.” He added: “The reduction in the top rate of tax is a mistake as well. When we’re making the case for tax cuts, the people who should benefit first are those who have least.”
Kami-Kwasi mini-Budget
Kwarteng, by now a much-reduced figure in the eyes of the party, made a subdued conference speech and exited rapidly. His reputation as the party intellectual with an economics doctorate, albeit on 17th monetary policy, was in tatters thanks to what was dubbed his “Kami-Kwasi” mini-budget and vaulted the Labour Party into an overwhelming 47 per cent lead in voting intentions over the Conservatives.
Then came Home Secretary Suella Braverman who’s been one of the party’s rising stars – her rapid ascent after only seven years as an MP shows the poverty of talent left in the Conservative Party. After Brexit in 2016, the centrist senior ministers were packed off to the backbenches or exited politics. The entire party is now dominated by what can best be described as the loony right. Braverman got a standing ovation after a barnstorming speech during which she promised to bring immigration down to ‘tens of thousands’ from the current annual 239,000.
Braverman, who’s of Indian origin, followed this up by rudely saying Indians were the worst visa overstayers and that she ‘dreamt’ of seeing planes with illegal migrants taking off for camps in Rwanda. It was clear Braverman was already establishing her uber-right credentials in case Truss was suddenly dethroned.
Kwarteng summoned back
All this set the stage for the latest drama. Kwarteng headed off for the IMF meeting in Washington but he was summoned back to London abruptly Friday. His flight back to London got the most hits on the Flight Tracker site. “I’m not going anywhere,” he declared to the waiting press there. In the official car heading to Whitehall, he scrolled through The Times online only to discover that Truss was indeed planning to throw him under a bus and sack him. It must have been a brutal blow considering that Truss and he had been a political double-act and close friends and even live on the same Greenwich street.
Kwarteng had been chancellor for 38 days, one of the shortest-serving tenures ever.
Now, the only question left is how long Truss can survive and who might replace her. There’s talk of Sunak, he was after all the overwhelming choice of Conservative MPs and seen as fiscally sound, or defence minister Ben Wallace who is seen as non-ideological and a safe pair of hands. Or Hunt, who was runner-up to Boris Johnson in the last leadership race.
De facto PM?
Hunt is already being called the de facto prime minister with Truss being dubbed PRINO – prime minister in name only. Axing Kwarteng may buy her a few more days or weeks but it’s clear she’s on the cliff edge. The betting is that she will have the indignity of becoming Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister. That dubious distinction right now is held by Conservative George Canning who was in office for 119 days before dying of TB (his son, also George Canning was the viceroy to India in 1858). To eclipse Canning’s record, Truss needs to last in 10 Downing until January 3, 2023.
The Financial Times declared: “Just over a month after she took office promising a new radical, tax-cutting Conservative government, Truss now faces political ruin, her signature economic policy rejected by markets, voters and her own MPs.” Columnist Matthew Parris who has been warning that Truss would be a disaster replayed his old comments about her. Last December he wrote: “There’s nothing there: beyond a leaping self-confidence that’s almost endearing in its wide-eyed disregard for the forces of political gravity.” By August, he was wildly waving red flags: “She’s crackers. It isn’t going to work.”
Even worse, the highly respected Economist has now tossed a wreath on her coffin, saying: “Liz Truss is already a historical figure. However long she now lasts in office, she is set to be remembered as the prime minister whose grip on power was the shortest in British political history. Ms Truss entered Downing Street on September 6th. She blew up her own government with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy-price guarantees on September 23rd. Take away the ten days of mourning after the death of the queen, and she had seven days in control. That is the shelf-life of a lettuce."
