Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

The Liz Truss survival guide

How the PM can weather the storm

(Credit: Getty images)

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you then, as Rudyard Kipling almost wrote, there is a strong possibility you haven’t appreciated the gravity of the situation. Or as Corporal Jones put it more pithily in Dad’s Army: ‘Don’t panic!’

It is undeniable that Liz Truss is in a bind. Her first big play following national mourning for the Queen – the ‘fiscal event’ of last Friday – has not gone well, contributing to a meltdown about UK prospects in financial markets and emergency intervention by the Bank of England. Two successive opinion polls have put Labour 17 points ahead – the sort of lead that suggests Keir Starmer’s party is heading for victory.

Meanwhile, a round of BBC local radio interviews has handsomely proved Truss’s own contention that she is ‘not the slickest communicator’, producing numerous embarrassing silences and misspeaking about maximum household energy bills to boot. After the Maybot was returned to have her factory settings altered, there is already talk of the Trussbot facing a similar fate.

But all is not lost. With expectations for her keynote party conference speech next week set very low, there are several things the Prime Minister can do in it to improve her own and Tory prospects.

There are several things the Prime Minister can do to improve her prospects

The first thing she must understand is that there is no hiding place: not being a naturally slick communicator does not absolve a PM from the essential task of communicating. Being prime minister is nothing like being a bog-standard cabinet minister, nor even a holder of one of the other great offices of state. It is down to you to explain the mission and how you will set about it.

Truss needs to distil this into a catchphrase – not just a general theme but a precise form of words – which everyone associated with the government should repeat ad nauseam until the whole Westminster Village is sick of it.

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