UK flounders in economic chaos

It would be hard to dispute British Conservative MP Mark Garnier’s conclusion that Prime Minister Liz Truss is “in office but not in power”. Some 40 days since she was sworn in, polls show her favourability rating at a record minus 70. That is 15 points lower than the record set by the loopy, far-left former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in June 2019. In the general election six months later, Labour was trounced by the Tories led by Boris Johnson.

Ms Truss’s plight is no surprise. After winning the leadership race to succeed Mr Johnson, she has shown breathtaking incompetence and lack of judgment. Supporters who claimed she would be “another Margaret Thatcher” were hopelessly wrong. Tax changes in the mini-budget announced by her friend and former chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng were always going to dismay financial markets and distress an electorate troubled by straitened times. When uproar ensued, she was the antithesis of “a lady not for turning”. She blamed it on Mr Kwarteng and appointed Jeremy Hunt as his successor. Mr Hunt has now countermanded almost everything that was in the mini-budget.

Seldom has a British prime minister appeared as hopelessly out of touch. A YouGov poll on Tuesday showed 80 per cent of Conservative Party members wanted her gone. Labour, even with its current dour and low-wattage leader Keir Starmer, has a lead of 30 points. Yet she wants to bat on, refusing widespread calls for her resignation from Tory MPs who anticipate an electoral catastrophe in 2024. As an influential power and key member of the Western alliance, Britain deserves and needs better. The economic and political instability wrought by Ms Truss and her party has been highly damaging. It has handed Labour a path to power that it has not had for many years.