Sellers’ remorse: how long will Liz Truss last before the party turns?
As she prepares to enter No 10, Liz Truss’s first battle may be with her own party, with some MPs already discussing ways they can oust her from Downing St.
The conversations are, for now, hushed. Most Tory WhatsApp groups are becalmed. Nonetheless, MPs have begun picking up their phones again, using the phrase “seller’s remorse” to refer to the decision to oust a sitting prime minister.
One senior backbencher walking up their constituency high street last week met a succession of voters who expressed disquiet at the removal of Boris Johnson: “I’ve had a whole load of people who don’t normally bother to seek me out saying they liked Boris, it was the media’s fault he went and they trusted him to get them through the cost of living crisis. When it’s those sort of people, rather than Lib Dems sending you an online petition, you pay attention.”
The MP then got on the phone to several colleagues and found they were asking the same question: “What if we put letters of no confidence in against Liz [Truss] and what if Boris ran again?” Nothing in the Conservative Party rules prevents an attempt to oust a leader as soon as they are elected.
This pre-emptive sedition is probably fantasy, but the fact that it is even being contemplated eight days before Johnson leaves Downing Street is remarkable. Certainly, the leadership contest, pitching Truss’s blunt ideological outspokenness against Rishi Sunak’s technocratic head-boy earnestness, has made the prospects more precarious for whichever one is declared the winner.
One former minister said: “People have seen the alternatives now and they aren’t convinced.”
This weekend Truss, the runaway frontrunner, is planning for government in some of the most difficult economic circumstances of the last half century, with the health service run down by the pandemic and inflation soaring – culminating last week in Ofgem’s announcement that energy prices will rise by 80 per cent to pounds 3,549 a year from October 1 and could hit pounds 5,300 in April. “Liz is under no illusion that the in-tray is bulging with landmines and hand grenades and banana skins,” a close aide said.
But as they plot a way through the minefield, Truss’s team is aware that hand grenades can be thrown by their own side too. “Party unity will be crucial,” the aide said. And no question looms larger than what Johnson will do with his new-found leisure time.
If, as every poll predicts, Truss is victorious, she will have the lowest support among MPs of any leader since formal elections began. About 200 Conservative MPs have never said they support her. The bitter divisions between Truss and Sunak over what to do about the cost of living crisis has turned the Tory party into two armed camps. “They hate each other and they think the other is completely wrong,” one senior Tory said.
Truss’s final plan to deal with the cost of living is a closely guarded secret, but advisers suggest it could include benefit rises for the poorest, easing income tax at the lower end of the income scale and cuts in VAT and fuel duty.
It is possible that Truss will seek to create a “crisis bond” borrowing mechanism to pay off the costs of Covid and the energy price rises over a long period.
Sunak’s allies predict that a huge rise in borrowing will see interest rates soar. “Either her supporters are going to be incredibly let down because her plans don’t survive contact with reality,” a Sunak supporter said. “Or she presses ahead and the country and the party will very quickly realise that her plans are not sustainable. As soon as she’s confronted with the amount she’ll need to borrow and the Treasury says there’s no way this will be covered by the financial markets, that’s where reality hits. She could end up like James Callaghan [the Labour prime minister from 1976-79]. If you can’t borrow at reasonable interest rates then you end up in a catastrophe, an IMF situation.” Callaghan’s government had to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
Truss’s allies accuse Sunak of a “scorched earth approach” and fear some of his backers will vote against her plans. One said: “I think it is disgraceful. For someone who was chancellor [of the exchequer] and expected us to vote for his national insurance rise, it’s a slap in the face. He’s like a petulant child. The budget has always been a confidence motion so if they want to vote against it they will lose the whip.”
A senior cabinet minister backing Truss agreed: “Tory MPs refusing to back finance bills is the equivalent of burning your membership card. There is a group of them who believe only the head boy should be in charge. They can’t abide the fact that Boris was disorganised and a bit of a rogue. Rishi cannot bear the thought he is being beaten by someone who is not the prefect. ”
The ferocity of the attacks on Truss has rocked even some of Sunak’s supporters. “Just being on the [Team Rishi] WhatsApp group, there is so much abuse about Liz,” one admitted. “I just think we should be attacking Labour, not fellow Conservatives.”
Into this civil war must walk Truss’s new chief whip, whom she has decided will be a woman. Anne-Marie Trevelyan, who whipped the rebellious European Research Group (ERG) during the Brexit battles in parliament, is one contender, along with Chloe Smith and Wendy Morton. Truss’s closest female ally, Therese Coffey, is more likely to become Cabinet Office minister and Whitehall enforcer, a post which Lord Frost, the former Brexit negotiator, has also discussed with her.
Truss allies also point out that “Liz has been engaging regularly with colleagues for a long time”, a coded admission that she was drumming up support for a leadership attempt for months. But one was keen to point out that the so-called “Fizz with Liz” gatherings were misrepresented: “She much prefers a cold sauvignon blanc”, referred to as Savvy B.
Truss’s spin doctor Adam Jones will handle her battles with the media and she will be prepared for her weekly jousts with Sir Keir Starmer by political consigliere Jason Stein, who is credited with her huge improvement in leadership debates. Part of the job of Mark Fullbrook, the veteran Tory campaigner who is set to become No 10 chief of staff, will be to handle Johnson, with whom he has worked on and off for years.
Allies of the outgoing prime minister say he has spent much of the time since his defenestration “between anger and denial” and there are signs that he has not totally given up on a comeback. One source said that a few weeks ago Johnson openly suggested: “I should be foreign secretary!” This was apparently intended as a joke and was taken in good part by Truss. But it also raises an interesting question: what does Johnson do next?
There is no doubt that Johnson wanted Truss to succeed him. A source said: “He was prepared to endorse her publicly if it looked like she was in danger of losing to Rishi. But it never looked like it was going to come to that.”
A senior government official said: “Boris is now getting two lots of advice. Some people are telling him to go away and have a nice life and make lots of money. Others are fuelling the stab-in-the-back theory and are suggesting to him that he could come back.”
It is unclear even to some high up in Team Truss whether Johnson plans to attend the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham in October, where his reception from the grassroots faithful would risk overshadowing Truss.
Whatever he does politically, Johnson’s first priority will be to make some money to help pay for the pounds 3.75 million house in Herne Hill, south London, that he is understood to have bought with his wife, Carrie.
He is touting around a book with publishers, based on diaries he has kept over the last few years. HarperCollins, which paid in the region of pounds 800,000 to publish David Cameron’s memoir, is the frontrunner. Johnson’s advance “would certainly be a seven-figure sum”, a publishing industry source said, and his book “would sell way more than Cameron’s”.
Johnson’s other move is likely to be to sign on with a speakers’ bureau, where he can expect to earn pounds 250,000 for a speech, particularly in America. Every written and spoken public pronouncement by Johnson will be scrutinised like no ex-leader’s since Margaret Thatcher.
“It’s a bit like David Moyes replacing Sir Alex Ferguson,” said one football fan on the Tory benches. Moyes lasted less than a year after he succeeded the Manchester United colossus.
Some MPs feel as if they have lost the person who kept the Tories winning. “A lot of colleagues are beginning to realise that the electoral cycle means we would have gone from a majority near 80 to one near 20 next time, but now we could be 20 short or worse,” an MP said. “People in a lot of marginal seats think Liz will not help them win their seats, but Boris might.” An MP said of the talk of an early leadership challenge: “It’s real. My constituents liked Boris. Colleagues watch with despair as Golden Balls [Sunak] implodes and Liz is not really cutting through. There is chatter.”
It is not just MPs who have expressed misgivings. Senior civil servants who have crossed paths with the foreign secretary are readily briefing that she is impulsive. Truss insisted on visiting Russia against official advice in February, where she faced a difficult showdown with Sergey Lavrov, Vladimir Putin’s veteran foreign minister. “The head of the Russia desk told her not to go, the head of security told her not to go,” an official said. “But she insisted.”
Truss was wrong-footed when she mistakenly said two ancient provinces of Russia were part of Ukraine. To the mandarins in Whitehall this was proof they were right, but Truss regarded the trip – showing the world she was prepared to stand up to Putin – as a success. On her return, she is said to have “barely spoken to” officials who advised against the visit. “She plays favourites,” a senior civil servant said.
Truss hopes that a new cabinet secretary, James Bowler, will get officials on board. She will also use cabinet appointments to try to show she has a big-tent approach. The big jobs will go to her allies, with her longstanding confidant Kwasi Kwarteng and Suella Braverman “nailed on” as chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, and James Cleverly highly likely to be foreign secretary. Simon Clarke, who represents a red wall seat, is considered a good fit for levelling-up secretary.
The Brexit grandee Sir Iain Duncan Smith is likely to be leader of the Commons and jobs are likely to go to other leadership candidates Kemi Badenoch (education), Tom Tugendhat (security) and Penny Mordaunt (party chairman). Ben Wallace will stay at defence while Sir Robert Buckland is tipped for a return to the Ministry of Justice or to become attorney-general after he defected from Sunak to Truss. Sir John Redwood will return to the Treasury and Lord Forsyth is the favourite to be leader of the Lords.
Other names floated for promotion include Ranil Jayawardena, Chris Philp, Dehenna Davison and Gareth Bacon, a former deputy London mayor. Rob Butler and Dean Russell, Truss’s parliamentary private secretaries, are described as “ones to watch”.
Sunak has made clear he cannot serve in Truss’s cabinet, but she may need to extend an olive branch to some of his team, say her allies. John Glen, who served under Sunak in the Treasury, is in contention for a job at work and pensions, while Laura Trott and Craig Williams have also been touted as ministers. Some in Truss’s camp believe removing Nadine Dorries, her most combative fan, could serve as a peace offering. However, “anyone who has been gunning for Liz in the campaign is going to struggle” to get a job. That means the end of Dominic Raab and Michael Gove. Steve Barclay, the health secretary, is preparing for a winter crisis in the NHS. In the hope of keeping his job, aides are outlining his plans to improve ambulance handover times, build A & E capacity and cut the number of administrators. But fellow ministers say Barclay has been privately withering about Truss’s economic plans (something his aides deny). The health job is more likely to go to Nadhim Zahawi, the current chancellor.
Truss’s success, one Sunak supporter suggested, will come down to “whether she is going to be Lyndon Johnson or Boris Johnson”. If the latter, the MP said Truss would “appoint a lot of cronies”. Or she could emulate the US president “who spent years tacking to the right to get the job” and then surprised people with “a war on poverty” and the biggest civil rights act since Abraham Lincoln.
In the short term, Truss will use her planned speech from the steps of Downing Street, a week tomorrow, to level with the public that “the times are hard and the tempest is here”, as one aide put it. Her main task is to try to convince them “I get it” about the cost of living. She will then outline an immediate support package, a long-term economic plan and her desire to get Whitehall to “deliver on a smaller number of key priorities”.
In the longer term, they hope the proximity of a general election will “sharpen minds” and the loyalties of rebel MPs. Her team has divided her political strategy into three phases: the first 100 days; the period from the new year until the general election; and the next five years.
Johnson’s fans are not sure if she will get that far.
The Sunday Times
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