Liz truss

Tuesday

Liz Truss

Full text: The PM’s first speech on the steps of No. 10

Good afternoon. I have just accepted Her Majesty the Queen’s kind invitation to form a new government.  Let me pay tribute to my predecessor. Boris Johnson delivered Brexit, the Covid vaccine and stood up to Russian aggression. History will see him as a hugely consequential prime minister. I’m honoured to take on this responsibility at a vital time for our country. What makes the United Kingdom great is our fundamental belief in freedom, in enterprise and in fair play. Our people have shown grit, courage and determination time and time again. We now face severe global headwinds caused by Russia’s appalling war in Ukraine and the aftermath of Covid. Now

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Coffey good for health?

Even though Liz Truss won’t start forming her government until after she has seen the Queen at Balmoral, many of the top roles are already nailed down. The latest dead cert is Thérèse Coffey, who will be Health Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister. The seniority of this role tells us a number of things. One is that Truss wants her strongest supporters close to her. Not only was Coffey pro-Truss from the outset, she is also one of her closest friends in politics. Linking the deputy and health jobs also signals that the new Prime Minister is taking the NHS backlog seriously. It would be a bizarre choice for a

Steerpike Steerpike

Flashback: Truss calls for the monarchy’s abolition

It’s Liz versus Liz today as the Queen prepares to kiss hands at Balmoral with Britain’s 56th Prime Minister. While attention will focus this morning on Boris Johnson’s imminent resignation statement, it will thereafter shift to his successor, as she becomes Her Majesty’s 15th First Minister of her 70 year-long reign. But Truss is slightly different from Elizabeth II’s previous 14 premiers: she’s the only one to openly call for the abolition of the monarchy. Archival footage remains of Truss delivering a fiery speech to the 1994 Liberal Democrat conference in which she talked of canvassing outside the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and (ironically) finding no support for the royals.

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Get ready for Liz mania

Here she is, then. Liz Truss is Britain’s third woman Prime Minister and she’s already suffering from the not-so-soft bigotry of low expectations. Almost everyone is looking at this woman the Tory membership has chosen to lead us all and feeling glum. She is someone widely seen in political and media circles as a lightweight and an embarrassment. The overly drawn-out and stale leadership battle between her and Rishi Sunak hasn’t helped either. Can Liz Truss ever hope to win a general election? But most new leaders enjoy a popularity bounce upon entering high office. Remember May mania? She experienced a five per cent surge in the polls in her

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Revealed: Labour’s tactics to deal with Truss

Keir Starmer tonight told the weekly parliamentary Labour party meeting that ‘we will never underestimate Liz Truss’. The Labour leader added that ‘she is a talented politician who has got to the top through hard work and determination’ and that ‘she will do whatever it takes to keep them in power’. He warned that ‘the polls might tighten and her plans might create some buzz’. It was a reminder to the party, which often struggles to accept female Tory leaders, not to fall into the trap of mocking Truss or feasting too much on the Tory civil war. How will Labour approach the new PM? Starmer will be asking her

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The problems of mid-term PMs

Any Prime Minister who takes over mid-term has to contend with a certain set of problems. Liz Truss will wish she had been propelled through the front door of No. 10 by the momentum of a general election victory. The first difficulty is that you have no personal mandate. This doesn’t just affect your relationship with the electorate, but your own MPs too. Boris Johnson benefitted from a sense that he was a winner, which made MPs more prepared to trust his judgment. Liz Truss will have to go that much further to persuade MPs of her political calculations. It also means MPs will be more jumpy if the polls are bad.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can Liz Truss deliver, deliver, deliver?

What does deliver, deliver, deliver mean? Liz Truss had it as her payoff on accepting the leadership of the Conservative party this afternoon, so clearly it means something to her. She told the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre:  My friends, we need to show that we will deliver over the next two years. I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy. I will deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills, but also dealing with the long term issues we have on energy supply. And I will deliver on the National Health Service. But we will all deliver for our country, and I will

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The case against a snap election

Unless Her Majesty throws us all a curveball, Liz Truss will be the next prime minister. So let’s knock something on the head here and now: she is under no obligation to call an election before January 2025. The replacement of one prime minister with another in the middle of a parliamentary term is not a democratic deficiency. It is parliamentary democracy in action. The prime minister and their cabinet colleagues are the Queen’s ministers and when one ministry replaces another, power does not transfer directly but through the sovereign. It is the Queen who issues an invitation to form a government in her name and she does so on

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Are the markets scared of Liz Truss?

Look at the chart for interest rate expectations in isolation, and you might come to the conclusion that Rishi Sunak is right about Liz Truss’s fiscal policies. In June, markets were expecting rates to peak at around 3.5 per cent next year; now they are expecting them to reach close to 4.5 per cent. Moreover, as Truss’s victory came to be seen as inevitable, the FTSE 100 plunged from 7,550 on 19 August to 7,230 this morning – a fall of 4.2 per cent. The pound has fallen from $1.22 on 10 August to $1.15 now. Markets could be forgiven some apprehension But hang on a minute. Markets have been

Katy Balls Katy Balls

This week will define Liz Truss’s premiership

This lunchtime Liz Truss has been announced as the new leader of the Conservative party. After a contest that spanned the summer, the chair of the 1922 Committee Sir Graham Brady announced the result, with Truss winning 81,326 votes to Rishi Sunak’s 60,339. Some 654 votes were rejected, suggesting spoiled ballots. This means Truss won with 57 per cent of the vote – a narrower margin of victory than her predecessor Boris Johnson who beat Jeremy Hunt with 66 per cent of the vote in 2019. This means her lead over Sunak was smaller than several of the membership polls suggested – and the contest was tighter than expected. Unlike Theresa

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Ten graphs that Liz Truss can’t ignore

The new Prime Minister’s honeymoon starts and ends today. Once Liz Truss formally enters Downing Street tomorrow she will be under pressure to tackle the enormous economic crises facing the country, with very little time to announce her policy plans. Truss herself has pledged to reveal her plan for rising energy bills within the first week of her premiership, and her plans to slash tax within the first month. While at the forefront of political discussion, these are but a few of the emergencies that the government must grapple with in the weeks and months ahead. Below are ten graphs that the Truss administration can’t ignore if she and her government

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will Liz Truss kill levelling up?

Levelling up is probably not even in the top tier of Liz Truss’s intray for this week, given the pressure to do something big on energy bills, and then to address the multiple other crises including the NHS, the Northern Ireland Protocol and Ukraine. But what she does with her predecessor’s flagship policy is a matter of great anxiety for MPs and activists in Red Wall seats. I spent some time over the weekend with Conservative councillors, MPs and Tory members in Greater Manchester. Unsurprisingly, most of them had supported Truss as be party leader. But most of them were also anxious about the future of levelling up, or whatever

Steerpike Steerpike

Who will lead for Liz in the Lords?

The Westminster WhatsApps are ablaze this morning with the age old question: who is up and who is down? With Liz Truss’s coronation expected just before lunchtime, attention has turned to the identity of her new cabinet. The dynamics and timing of the contest have meant the last few weeks of this election has become something of a protracted transition, with half the top jobs already divvied up. But one role over which there are question marks is the leadership of the House of Lords. In recent years, relations between the Upper House and No. 10 have deteriorated somewhat, in light of rows over Brexit and parliamentary procedure. For six

Thursday

Steerpike

Truss’s Oxford Europhilia revealed

Throughout the leadership contest, Liz Truss has been all too keen to paint herself as a Brexit queen, keen to slay the dragons of Brussels. Yet Mr S has been doing some digging into the Foreign Secretary’s past and it transpires she was rather more of a Europhile than previously revealed. Truss even headed up a pro-EU group that backed the Maastricht Treaty while a student at Oxford University doing PPE. Despite being a late convert to the Brexit cause, the PM-in-waiting was once an active Liberal Democrat and pro-European. As a blue stocking girl in the mid-1990s she was a key player in the federalist Oxford Reform Club, even

Katy Balls Katy Balls

‘Those Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me’: Dominic Raab on Truss, Sunak and his own future

If Liz Truss is named prime minister next week, her administration will look rather different to the government of the past few years. Rishi Sunak has suggested he won’t accept any job offer. Michael Gove, a Sunak supporter, has pre-emptively ruled himself out. Other prominent backers are expected to join the pair on the backbenches – such as the Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab. Truss’s allies say he deserves what’s coming his way for having likened her economic plans of immediate tax cuts to an ‘electoral suicide note’. Yet for a man on political death row, Raab is remarkably cheery when we meet at The Spectator’s offices.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Gorbachev dies, Gibraltar becomes a city (again) and Meghan’s Mandela moment

Home Liz Truss, the contender for the Conservative party leadership who is expected to become prime minister next Tuesday, resisted temptations to say what she would do about the national energy price crisis. But she was said to have in her pocket licences for new drilling in the North Sea. Nadhim Zahawi, the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the time being, said that even people earning £45,000 a year would need help with their energy bills this winter. The price cap for energy set by the regulator Ofgem will rise by 80 per cent in October, with electricity going up from 28p per kilowatt hour to 52p and gas from

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Trussonomics: a beginner’s guide

When polls started to show Liz Truss miles ahead of Rishi Sunak in the Tory leadership contest, her team adopted a cautious campaign strategy. Why gamble on another interview with Nick Robinson when last time she had struggled to name a single economist who backed her economic plans? Eventually she landed on Professor Patrick Minford, an academic at Cardiff Business School and a bullish Brexiteer. Minford went on the record calling for interest rates to rise to 7 per cent, which Truss then had to defend and deflect. But that moment in the Robinson interview, widely reported as a humiliation, turned out to be one of the most helpful points

Monday

Liz Rowlinson

How to join the Greenwich set

The steamy Netflix period drama Bridgerton might not immediately put you in mind of the Tory inner circle. (Liz Truss for one has professed to be fan of grittier TV dramas such as Scandi crime thriller The Bridge.) Yet the two have some common ground – and it can be found in Greenwich, south-east London. Forget the Notting Hill set of the Cameron era and the Islington mafia of the Blair years. It seems that a verdant corner of the (Labour) royal borough has turned blue, with Truss, potential chancellor-in-waiting Kwasi Kwarteng and former Brexit minister Lord Frost (now tipped to head up the Cabinet Office) all living in the period

Thursday

Cindy Yu

I’d be the perfect communist shill

Could I be the model communist shill? Consider these facts: I was born and raised in China. I speak and read Chinese. Some question my English accent, almost suspiciously posh given that I didn’t speak a word of the language until the age of ten. Before the pandemic, I visited China regularly. My podcast, Chinese Whispers, often explains the Chinese government’s way of looking at things. I studied at Oxford and now work at the heart of the British establishment. Am I not ideally placed to advance Beijing’s agenda? When I started my career, this was all a joke. Now it’s less of one. The atmosphere in Britain towards China

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Who will Liz Truss forgive?

Liz Truss has always been more popular with Tory party members than with Tory politicians. The moment of greatest peril for her in the Conservative leadership race was when MPs were whittling down the final two candidates. After being knocked out in the second round, Suella Braverman urged her Brexiteer backers to get behind the Foreign Secretary. Many refused to do so and instead supported Kemi Badenoch, which meant that Truss’s vote count only went up by seven MPs. The momentum could have moved to Badenoch, then behind by just 13. ‘It was the most stressful point of the contest,’ recalls a supporter of the Foreign Secretary. Eventually Truss made