Liz Truss now has no mandate and should go
Daniel Finkelstein
Friday October 14 2022, 3.45pm, The Times
Liz Truss’s premiership is finished, even if it hasn’t stopped.
There have been moments of crisis in the past century that have led to the chancellor resigning or the prime minister losing their credibility or the government being hobbled. But this is different.
The creation of the National Government in 1931, the decision of the Attlee government to devalue the pound in 1949, Jim Callaghan’s resignation as chancellor in 1967, Denis Healey’s IMF crisis in 1976 and Black Wednesday in 1992 all did profound damage to the governments responsible.
Yet each of these was about the collapse of a single plank of policy. What has just happened is far more serious. It is about the collapse of an argument and a mandate.
For more than a decade Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have argued that tax-cutting would generate its own revenue and could be safely done. This was the core of Truss’s leadership campaign. It was one of the main reasons she won. And it did not last
much more than a month in office.
What has happened is closer to the winter of discontent of 1978-79. That event brought to an end years of argument, fatally undermining the case for corporatism. Twenty years later the Conservatives were still using pictures of uncollected rubbish and warning about the unions.
In a decade
Labour will still be talking about what has just happened. It will take years for the
Conservative Party to be able to deploy the argument that it alone is fiscally prudent. And this is the argument that has repeatedly secured it victory.
Only with great skill will Conservatives succeed in separating the bit of the party’s policy which has proven utterly unsustainable — borrowing to cut taxes — from the part they will wish to maintain, the argument that Britain needs to be a relatively low tax and low regulation country to prosper.
Only with great skill will the government be able to create a convincing narrative that somehow integrates this fiasco into some sort of tale of purpose and clarity.
Does
Liz Truss possess such great skill? If she does, it is not apparent. She did not meet today’s big moment with a big performance, to put it mildly. Her words were pedestrian and her performance was flat. But I think they are the best she can do. There has never been a moment when her public appearances have been anything more than adequate, at best.
So if she remains as prime minister it is hard to see her government reviving. The Conservative Party will be doomed to defeat and the country will have to live for two years with a government stumbling along, unable to connect with voters or explain itself.
There were many people who criticised Truss for having a mandate only from a handful of Tory members. Now she doesn’t have a mandate even from them, as she has abandoned the main policy she advanced and adopted one that her supporters claimed was mere socialism.
For her to suggest that
Kwasi Kwarteng is somehow more culpable than her for this mess is absurd. They thought up this policy together. They were told for more than ten years it was wrong and they failed to listen. Since he has gone, in all honour she should resign too. And they should both apologise for having made such a flimsy case in such a high-handed manner.
The only argument for allowing her to carry on as prime minister is that nobody could bear the alternative — the whole circus of deposing her and replacing her. But surely inertia and embarrassment, as powerful as they are in politics, will not be enough to keep her in place? They certainly shouldn’t be.
