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. Only then will normal people, for whom politics is far from an obsession, become aware of it.
I’d suggest something like ‘stay calm and stick to the plan’ and even distribute T-shirts with that slogan on to Tory conference-goers. Such a motto would not only tap into the mythology surrounding Britain’s greatest moments having required steadiness and stoicism – ‘keep calm and carry on’ – but would also draw a useful battle line between Team Truss and two particular groups who are causing her difficulty: the sensationalist elements of the media and a relatively small number of Conservative MPs who want her to fail.
Truss should use her speech next Wednesday to enlist her party loyalists and potentially the wider public against both groups, building an argument about why they are foolish. It is widely felt that the rise of 24-hour rolling TV news and its equally unruly twin, social media, has produced a lurch into hyperbole. The catastrophising of everything – from the risk of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit to climate change, from Covid to the economy – has been noted as an unwelcome result. Many people now say they have tuned out of the news cycle because of this unadulterated diet of doom.
So these bits of the media are there for the taking and so are those Tory MPs already briefing that she is toast. Both can be addressed via an echo of Thatcher and ‘not for turning’. I’d suggest something like: ‘You flap if you want to, but I’m not going to. The right place for flappers is in the 1920s, not the 2020s.’
A line urging local associations to remind MPs of the need to bat for their own team would also surely unleash thunderous applause, given so many in the hall will have recently voted for Truss to replace Boris Johnson. Perhaps she could point out that there are a handful of MPs who have been associated with bringing down both May and Johnson and who are now gunning for her and add:
‘Let me say to those few colleagues who are making names for themselves going on the airwaves to undermine their leaders that there is another way of looking at this: perhaps the problem is not the leaders, perhaps the problem is you.
As for her economic strategy, Truss needs to realise that ‘supply-side reform’ is impenetrable jargon to most voters. She must boil things down to simple principles in the manner of the plain-speaking Yorkshire woman she depicted herself as being during the leadership contest: make work pay, make enterprise profitable, make welfare a safety net again and not a long-term lifestyle option and accelerate useful new infrastructure. And then have faith in the British people to get on with it.
This mission needs also to be pitched as a long-term grind that is likely only to start to come good late in 2023. This will help anchor expectations in a useful place: no sugar-rush of instant popularity but added authority if and when polls start to tighten in the run-up to the 2024 election.
There is every chance that lots of economic indicators will improve by then in any case: A pound to dollar rate of just above parity is surely much more likely to swing back in sterling’s favour than any further against it; the cost of the energy rescue schemes is more likely to undershoot than overshoot projections, given the direction of the price of wholesale gas; any recession may well be briefer and milder than a populace bludgeoned by broadcast media has been led to expect.
The mortgage market is the key area flashing on red alert. Some new Treasury schemes to help lenders offer borrowers repayment holidays or longer repayment terms can only go so far but would at least help Truss in the ‘on your side’ stakes.
If she plays it right, Truss can emerge a week from now not as remotely popular, but at least as a woman of substance who has earned the right to do things her way for the time being.
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