Can a honeymoon be over before the Wedding March has even begun? Liz Truss might be about to find out. For while the shoo-in for the Conservative leadership has been wooing members, amongst Conservative party voters in 2019, she is already beginning to lose her appeal. For the time being at least, it seems that the more Tory voters (as opposed to members) see of Truss the less they like her.
Of course, Truss has so far been focusing on the only electorate that currently counts to her: Conservative party members. Constituting just 0.3 per cent of the electorate they like her talk of tax cuts, exiling refugees to Rwanda, fracking, winning the ‘war on woke’ as well as attacks on solar panels and the French – but care little for levelling up. But winning them over is a very different proposition to appealing to the millions of voters Truss needs if she is to lead her party to a fourth general election victory in a row. A skilful leader can shift gears once in Number 10 – and Truss has plans to address the deepening cost-of-living crisis which might improve her standing with the wider public. Let’s see.
But in her campaign to become leader Truss might already have stymied her hopes of clawing back the ten-point lead most pollsters say Labour now enjoys over the Conservatives.
Truss might already have stymied her hopes of clawing back the ten-point lead most pollsters say Labour now enjoys over the Conservatives
If there is one issue on which the Tory faithful and the rest of the country violently disagree it is the character of Boris Johnson. Conservatives are die-hard Boris fans. From the outside this is hard to fathom because Boris Johnson was never the electoral force Conservatives assumed. If he helped deliver an 80-seat majority in 2019, that was mostly thanks to Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn. But if Boris Johnson was a candidate in the Tory leadership race today – despite all the baggage of partygate – he would beat Truss and Rishi Sunak hands down. Indeed, a majority of Tory members believe their MPs should not have forced his resignation.
Truss has openly appealed to this sentiment, at times agreeing with members that Johnson was brought down not by his own actions but by the media and she has made the most of the fact that she remained loyal to the bitter end – unlike Sunak. At a recent hustings Truss even said she would have Johnson as Prime Minister rather than Sunak.
In their own campaigns for the leadership Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat argued the party needed to distance itself from the troubled Johnson regime if it was to restore its electoral fortunes. Most Conservative MPs recognised this, as two thirds of them supported Sunak or Mordaunt in the round that identified which two candidates should be put to the members. Truss, thanks to prime ministerial patronage, will likely persuade the MPs who helped bring down Johnson to look on her in a more positive light. But it will be harder for Truss, the avowed Boris loyalist, to win back the many 2019 Conservative voters who wanted to see the back of Johnson.
Truss will hope such voters’ minds will become focused on her efforts to keep their energy bills down. Perhaps they will; but her Boris problem is not going away any time soon: in fact it might get worse before it gets better.
Most immediately, the privileges committee inquiry into whether Johnson misled the Commons over partygate should be finalised in the autumn. Boris loyalists have characterised this investigation as a witch hunt even though a majority of the committee’s members are Conservative MPs. If the committee finds Johnson guilty and imposes a sanction – perhaps suspending him from the Commons – how will Prime Minister Truss respond? She has already said she would like to stop the inquiry, but would she really be prepared to instruct her MPs to vote down the committee’s recommendation and determinedly fly in the face of public opinion?
The committee might find Johnson innocent: but that does not solve her Boris problem. For rumour has it Johnson is bitter at his ousting and has ambitions to return to Number 10. Should he resume his lucrative career as a columnist in the Tory press Johnson will certainly have the ideal platform to act as he did during David Cameron’s leadership, that is as a permanent thorn in the Prime Minister’s side, with a direct line to supporters in the constituencies. And, of course, Johnson’s best hopes of returning to power rest on Truss failing.
As she battles the cost-of-living crisis Prime Minister Truss should expect little loyalty from her predecessor. But once in Number 10 she might feel she no longer needs to keep up her loyalty towards Boris Johnson either. Truss’s career consists of the abandonment of one cause after another, be it the Liberal Democrats, republicanism, Remain or Cameroonian centrist Conservatism. With members’ votes in the bag and the imperative to show she represents change to the fore how long before Truss decides the time is ripe to turn on Johnson?
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