If Tories are quick, Truss can be a bad dream

Just as Keir Starmer has moved Labour on from Jeremy Corbyn, Conservatives can regain some credit by getting rid of an aberration.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer and Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss leave the Palace of Westminster after the presentation of addresses by both houses of Parliament following the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September. Picture: Getty Images

First the good news for Britain’s Tory MPs. It may not feel like this, but now could be the weekend when they decide to turn the corner. Should Tory MPs choose to take it, a path away from electoral extinction exists. By 2024 Liz Truss could be just a half-forgotten bad dream, not today’s nightmare.

She must go, of course. Hardly worth discussing that. Sucking Jeremy Hunt into her orbit of electoral death won’t cut it, won’t save her government from slaughter at the hands of the voters.

Appointing as her Chancellor a decent, moderate man whose whole political instinct runs counter to her own is intended to save her skin for a time, and it may.

But the time bought will be months, weeks, hours, minutes – surely not years – in which a sulphurous parliamentary party under a lame-duck Prime Minister lurches towards a general election, paralysed by the threat of division lobby mutinies.

The Prime Minister is now close to falling. She must be pushed. Her whole aim this weekend has been to create an impression of continuity. An impression of continuity is the gravest threat this Conservative government faces. That — should her party reprieve her just because she sacked the fellow who carried out her orders — would be the bad news.

Now back to the good news. You might think I’m mad, but I’m sure there’s still time for a clean and complete break with a terrible but short-lived interlude in their party’s history.

This would precisely mirror what Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer hopes to achieve by making Jeremy Corbyn seem like just a bad dream. Starmer is having some success. The Conservatives, under new leadership, could match his strategy. They could and must persuade us that their party, after a very frightening seizure, is returning to type: the party we always thought could be trusted with the economy.

Britain's Prime Minister Liz Truss at her press conference in the Downing Street briefing room on Friday after dismissing Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor. Picture: Pool / AFP

Bear with me, even if you doubt my sanity. I don’t want to throw pollsters’ graphs at you, but please focus your mind on just this: when a British political party is seen as the party best able to manage the economy, it wins the next general election. That has proved true even at times of great economic anxiety.

Indeed, George Osborne turned economic anxiety to the Tories’ advantage. A government does not have to banish economic insecurity to win in two years’ time: it just has to be seen as the safer bet.

Buried in this nation’s psyche runs a disposition to believe that the Tories best understand economic management. Even among those many who dislike the party, it is a subliminal default position. I’m not sure it’s really merited, but it’s there.

You have to work really hard, as Tony Blair did, to persuade voters otherwise, and even he had to promise to stick to Tory spending plans. Deep in his or her soul, the typical voter wants to think that, love ‘em or hate ‘em, Conservatives can at least add up.

It is therefore quite an achievement for Liz Truss to have overturned the assumption of numeracy in a few short weeks. It’s extremely important and urgent that the Conservative Party reassures the electorate that this destructive spasm under Truss was short-lived, an aberration, a moment of madness under an imposter who has now been rumbled; and that the voters’ original instinct about Conservative governments was right all along.

Yet the parliamentary party has to demonstrate this, and very soon, in a dramatically gripping way. To do it slowly, gently, with the minimum disruption, defeats the object. The story that impresses itself on the national imagination must be that a responsible party found a traitor to its cause in their midst – and ran her out of town.

Then prime minister Boris Johnson arrives with his wife Carrie Johnson as he prepares to deliver a farewell address before his official resignation at Downing Street in September. Picture: Getty Images

There is, of course, a different narrative that threatens: “The return of Boris Johnson, the king over the water.”

This would be a disaster. The dislike of Johnson that convulsed both his colleagues and the public just a few short months ago may have faded a bit now we’ve seen who followed, but there’s nothing like a kiss-and-make-up with an ex for reminding us why we split up in the first place. Albert Einstein was right: it is the very definition of madness to try the same thing a second time and expect a different result. Tory MPs would be stupid to do it and I don’t think they will.

In the days ahead the battle will be joined. Unless her MPs can locate their spine, she may cling on. Like a desperate balloonist throwing stuff out of the basket as the icy waves lick the wickerwork, Truss fights to stay aloft.

Over the side went the cut to rich people’s tax. Over the side now goes her own friend and chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and his deputy. With them goes the cut to a planned rise in corporation tax. Still in the basket are the hugely expensive small cut in the standard rate of income tax and the abolition of stamp duty. These too will be “postponed” if the balloon dips lower. They’ll be gone by Monday if it hits the waves.

In December last year I suggested of Truss that “there’s nothing there: nothing beyond a leaping self-confidence that’s almost endearing in its wide-eyed disregard for the forces of political gravity”.

This August brought more urgency: “She’s crackers. It isn’t going to work,” I wrote. It hasn’t. Suppressed panic will be gripping her, and I know how she’ll be rationalising what she has just done: “I must live to fight another day.” Yet it’s her very instinct for survival that’s the axe now hanging over the parliamentary party.

Liz Truss sits alongside Britain's Health Secretary and deputy Prime Minister Therese Coffey as she poses with members of her new cabinet in September. Pucture: Pool / AFP

They should dare hope. Keir Starmer’s present lead – to a considerable degree just a reflection of public animosity towards the alternative – depends upon much going right for him in the years ahead.

Just as I’ve said that the electorate, unless habitual assumptions are disturbed, were disposed to see Conservatives as good housekeepers, so the same electorate are disposed to see Labour as anti-business, in the pockets of the trade unions, and at the mercy of a powerful national party organisation still true to its 20th-century socialist roots. It wouldn’t take much to frighten voters into reverting to these assumptions.

It would be a bold columnist who declared the Tories could win next time. I think it imaginable though obviously not the likelihood. But under quiet, careful, numerate, grown-up leadership they could retrieve some of the trust they’ve blown.

Looking back from the northern autumn of 2024, this autumn could appear as the season the Conservative comeback began. I mentioned pushing weights from a balloon. The weight in question should be Liz Truss.

The Times