Liz truss

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

Truss can’t hide from the crisis she created

For a politician who only a few days ago was bravely mocking Vladimir Putin as a ‘sabre-rattling’ loudmouth ‘desperately trying to justify his catastrophic failures,’ Liz Truss has turned out to be the greatest coward ever to be prime minister. At least Putin feels the need to justify the catastrophe he has inflicted. Truss and her Chancellor believe they can hide away like children putting pillows over their heads to escape a bad dream, and say nothing at all. The public may not understand the full ramifications of the crisis the Conservatives have unleashed in a moment of ideological delirium. The technical reasons why the Bank of England had to promise

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

Will Liz Truss take on the IMF?

Tonight the International Monetary Fund has weighed in on the UK’s mini-Budget, offering a direct rebuke of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts. ‘We are closely monitoring recent economic developments in the UK and are engaged with the authorities,’ its spokesperson said, in reference to the fluctuating pound and rising borrowing costs. ‘Given elevated inflation pressures in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture’ – suggesting some concern that the measures could be inflationary. The IMF seems more frustrated with the ethics of the policies rather than their economic impact It’s the kind of intervention that does little to

Monday

James Forsyth

Labour storm ahead of Tories in latest poll

Tonight’s YouGov poll in the Times is brilliant news for Keir Starmer ahead of his conference speech tomorrow. It has Labour 17 points ahead, its biggest lead since the company started polling in 2001. These numbers, following the market reaction to the statement, are an awful start To be sure, the numbers reflect more voter disappointment with the government than a sudden bout of Starmer mania. Some 68 per cent of voters said the government was managing the economy badly. Only 12 per cent thought the ‘mini-Budget’ is affordable. Just 19 per cent said it was fair, against 57 per cent who thought it was not fair. And 69 per

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Liz Truss is a liberal. So how will she approach immigration?

Should Tories already be feeling buyer’s remorse over their new leader? It has been only 20 days since Boris Johnson, a liberal who pretended to be a populist, was replaced by Liz Truss, a liberal who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a liberal. Whereas Johnson’s was a patrician liberalism with a keen sense of public opinion, Truss is an economic liberal with a swot’s enthusiasm and a swot’s grasp of human instincts. In short, the Tories have swapped a lazy dissembler for an ardent geek. It’s not all they’ve swapped. The communitarian shift that began under Theresa May has been set in reverse and libertarianism has regained the

Thursday

Michael Simmons

Is Truss in trouble?

The history of political popularity shows things go in one direction: down. John Major entered office with a net satisfaction of +15 and left it having lost 42 points. Blair moved into Downing Street a whopping 60 points in the positive. When he left he’d fallen to -27. And so the story goes – even the Maybot started quite popular with a +35. Where you start can make all the difference. If things are only going to go one way, you want as handsome a margin as possible. That’s why today’s political monitor poll from Ipsos Mori could spell trouble for Truss. She’s beginning her term in office on minus

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Truss gets ready to be unpopular

Liz Truss is ready to be unpopular. Or at least that is what the new Prime Minister is keen to suggest. On a media round from New York – where she is attending her first international summit since entering No. 10 – she told the BBC’s Chris Mason: If that means taking difficult decisions which are going to help Britain become more competitive, help Britain become more attractive, help more investment flow into our country, yes, I’m absolutely prepared to make those decisions. ‘Yes, yes I am’, was how she answered Beth Rigby’s question about whether she was prepared to be unpopular. Is this significant? Well, it points to two things. First,

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Truss’s energy bailout is eye-watering

The government will announce tomorrow that it will cover the costs of more than £1 in every £3 of gas consumed by businesses and households over the next six months. There has been no subsidy of a market price on this scale in British history. Estimates of the final bill for taxpayers range from £100 billion to £200 billion, or more than the annual cost of running the NHS – if the scheme for households lasts for two years, as promised, and the separate one for all businesses runs for six months, to be followed by a less ambitious business scheme for another 18 months. This is a subsidy of more

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

How far will Truss’s ‘growth plan’ go?

It was only a few weeks ago that Liz Truss was talking about holding an ‘emergency’ fiscal event towards the end of September, mainly to address rising energy bills and how the government would support people through the winter. This targeted approach helped to justify the speed at which her new government would announce some major policy, and even more importantly was used to justify not commissioning analysis from the Office for Budget Responsibility to go alongside it. Energy bills were too time sensitive for the government to wait for the OBR to run all the numbers and produce forecasts, Team Truss’s argument went. The independent assessment of her plans (which must

Friday

Steerpike

Mark Field muses on Liz Truss’s fortunes

Since becoming the Tory leadership favourite early last month, Liz Truss is used to all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork. Old friends, former allies and even the odd foe have been very keen to share their opinions on Truss, the onetime Lib Dem radical turned Brexit-backing cabinet mainstay. But one person who we haven’t heard much from is Mark Field, her fellow former Conservative MP, with whom Truss had a headline-grabbing affair in the mid-2000s. But now the Camden New Journal have set tongues wagging with a cheeky little piece in this week’s edition about what Field has been up to since leaving parliament in late 2019.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Will Truss’s gamble on energy bills pay off?

Today’s energy bills announcement was the first really important moment of Liz Truss’s premiership so far – and may prove to be the most important one of her entire tenure. Kate has a run-down of the details of the policy here, but what the plan to freeze the average energy bill at £2,500 a year means politically is that there is a clear dividing line between the Truss government and Keir Starmer’s opposition – a line both of them are very happy to thicken.  A striking thing about Truss’s manner is that she goes headlong into the arguments of her opponents before they’ve even had a chance to raise them.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Buckle up! The Liz Truss era is here

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng arrive in Downing Street having been on a long political journey together. Both elected in 2010, they have co-written books setting out their shared economic agenda; they have co-founded party groups during their time in parliament; and now they will govern together. The future direction of the country, and the Tories’ electoral prospects, depend on the success of this new Downing Street partnership. Their strategy is one of big economic gambles from day one. Chief among these is the big energy package, potentially costing over £100 billion, designed to ‘freeze’ energy prices for households and businesses. This will involve the state – future taxpayers, in

The Spectator

Liz Truss can’t ignore the issue of NHS reform

It’s hard to think of any Prime Minister who has entered office surrounded by such low expectations. Liz Truss was backed by just over half of Conservative party members and secured barely an eighth of MPs in the first ballot. Her critics dismiss her as a lightweight, wholly unsuited to tackling the problems now facing the country. The presumption is not just for trouble, but calamity: the fastest drop in living standards in living memory, followed by prolonged recession and worse. So if Truss manages to send inflation into reverse and makes a noticeable cut to taxes by Easter, it will be seen as quite an achievement. She has also

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Truss in, Johnson out and Nord Stream 1 off

Home Liz Truss, the new Prime Minister, said in a speech outside 10 Downing Street: ‘Boris Johnson delivered Brexit, the Covid vaccine and stood up to Russian aggression. History will see him as a hugely consequential prime minister.’ For her part: ‘I am confident that together we can ride out the storm.’ Earlier, on being elected leader of the Conservative party, she had said: ‘I know that we will deliver, we will deliver, we will deliver.’ She had been elected by party members ahead of Rishi Sunak by 81,326 votes to 60,399 (57.4 per cent to 42.6). Turnout was 82.6 per cent. She travelled to Balmoral the next day to

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Kwasi Kwarteng is a politician from a different age

Liz Truss doesn’t waste energy on unnecessary emotion. At the announcement of her victory at the QE2 Centre, she ditched the convention of hugging your partner and shaking hands with the runner-up. Instead she grabbed her notes from her husband Hugh O’Leary and marched past Rishi Sunak without a second glance. No time for sentimentality! Different from Johnson, surrounded by his siblings and ubiquitous father, or the uxorious Cameron and doting May. She knifed to the microphone with the same steely determination she showed all those decades ago when she told the Lib Dem conference to abolish the monarchy. The script has changed, the focus has not. Just before midnight

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Truss’s appointments are ruffling Tory feathers

Liz Truss has started to appoint supporters of her leadership campaign rivals to ministerial positions, answering the demand (mostly from said supporters of her leadership campaign rivals) to ‘reach out’ across the party to bring the Conservatives back together. There are Rishi Sunak backers in the latest slew of jobs – Robert Jenrick returns to government as health minister, Jeremy Quin goes to the Home Office, Mark Spencer to Defra and Victoria Prentis goes to DWP – along with two who had previously backed Kemi Badenoch (Rachel Maclean goes to Justice and Julia Lopez goes to DCMS). In the interests of fairness and equality, there are a few Truss backers

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Liz Truss’s first PMQs felt like a dress rehearsal

That felt like a dress rehearsal. Liz Truss sailed through her first PMQs which will probably be her easiest. It may turn out to have been her best. When she arrived, the House burst into ecstasies of joy as if she’d just found the cure for malaria, solved the Jack the Ripper case and liberated Hong Kong. The questions lobbed at her were as soft as pizza dough, and each was prefixed with a note of congratulation and welcome. The mood was warm enough even to thaw the frost that covers Theresa May. Suspending her sulk for a moment she made an ironic observation. ‘Why does she think it is

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Liz Truss should increase Universal Credit

Liz Truss’s plans for a two-year energy bill freeze, estimated to cost £100 billion, underscore three points. One, the incoming Prime Minister expects the energy crisis to be with us for more than one winter. Two, she grasps how lethal it will be to the Tories’ hopes of re-election if the Treasury doesn’t intervene in a big way. Three, she is prepared to run up government debt even further in order to mitigate a crisis that threatens people’s quality of life. This third point is the crucial one. When a neo-Thatcherite like Truss concedes the merits of transformative interventions funded by borrowing, it opens up a broader conversation. If the Treasury

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Liz Truss’s well-scripted first PMQs

Liz Truss’s first Prime Minister’s Questions was well-scripted, both for the new Tory leader and Keir Starmer. They had come along planning to talk about the cost of living crisis: Truss so that she could reassure the public (and her own party) that ‘immediate action to help people with their bills’ was on the way, and Starmer to probe her on how she was going to pay for it. The exchanges worked for both of them this time around. The exchanges worked for both of them this time around Because Truss is going for an energy price freeze – proposed by Labour – Starmer had to move his attack from

James Heale James Heale

What does Truss’s cabinet tell us about her?

‘Loyalty’ remarked Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe is ‘the Tory party’s secret weapon.’ The near constant blue-on-blue attacks of the last six years have made a mockery of this aphorism. But Liz Truss’s first cabinet has demonstrated the importance which she places on loyalty when it comes to selecting her top team. Some 31 names are now attending cabinet; of those just one (Michael Ellis) backed Rishi Sunak. New leaders are entitled to select who they want –⁠ Boris Johnson fired half the ministers upon taking office in 2019 and ruthlessly purged Jeremy Hunt’s supporters from his top team. But he, unlike Truss, surpassed expectations in the membership vote (winning 66 per

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

The problem with Liz Truss

Was it just me or was Liz Truss actually smirking during her statement outside Downing Street, the one littered with cliches about spades in the ground and wince-making turns of phrase like ‘aspiration nation’? Another two years of this PM talking about being ‘determined to deliver’ (deliver what, Liz?) is going to be really hard going.  Just listen to her. Look at her. Is this really the best that we can get from a country of 67 million people? Liz Truss? Can even the most blinkered Conservative find any actual eloquence or charm of manner; or sincerity in the fashion of Theresa May, charisma like Tony Blair, or humour in