‘A case of when, not if’ Truss leaves Downing Street amid Tory plotting

The fast-motion car crash of Liz Truss’s premiership is shocking but hardly surprising. As soon as she emerged as a potential PM, analysts were preparing to say “I told you so”. Truss is a “planet-sized mass of overconfidence and ambition teetering upon a pinhead of a political brain”, Matthew Parris, a columnist for The Times and former aide to Margaret Thatcher, wrote during the Tory leadership contest this summer. “It must all come crashing down.”

Now Truss is trying to save her beleaguered premiership, which came under fire in record time. Weeks after the mini-budget sent both the pound and Tory poll ratings nosediving, the prime minister sacked her finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng on Friday and replaced him with Jeremy Hunt. No Truss ally, Hunt is seen as a competent technocrat; he discarded nearly all the unfunded tax cuts and warned of further fiscal consolidation amid rampant inflation and government borrowing.

Truss showed how keen she is to stay in Downing Street by ditching her supply-side agenda, the centrepiece of her political vision.

But many expect that, like a football captain who started an all-important match by belting the ball into the back of their own net, Truss will be taken off the pitch.

British tabloid The Daily Star has dominated the national conversation over recent days by asking if a lettuce from supermarket Tesco will last longer than Truss. The lettuce is the clear favourite in the betting markets.

Unusually, the prime minister did not appear in the Commons on Monday to answer a question about firing Kwarteng. “It is time for leaders to lead, but where is the prime minister?” said Labour leader Keir Starmer. Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt insisted that Truss was “not under a desk”. Truss later turned up for less than an hour, listening silently as Hunt made a statement

Members of the powerful 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers held talks about replacing Truss on Friday. A group of senior Conservatives were then invited to a “dinner of grown-ups” over the weekend to discuss installing in Downing Street one of Truss’s former leadership rivals, either Rishi Sunak or Mordaunt, with the two ex-contenders uniting in a “joint ticket”.

Truss is “clearly not going to lead them into the next election, so it’s is a case of when, not if” she leaves office, said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “It’s difficult to see why the party would want to hang on to a loser longer than they have to.”

‘Boring is reassuring’

Truss has a 59 percent disapproval rating, according to Politico’s polling aggregate, making her even more unpopular than her predecessor Boris Johnson at his nadir. The word voters most frequently choose to describe her is “incompetent” – rivalled only by “useless”, “untrustworthy” and “dangerous”.

After the Tory landslide in 2019, Labour now enjoys a whopping 26 point poll lead – an extraordinary reversal almost entirely due to the Conservatives’ own-goals.

First ‘Partygate’ destroyed Boris Johnson’s popularity. He was replaced by Truss, who sparked market mayhem with those deficit-fuelling tax cuts for the rich and big corporations. By doing so, she managed to alienate both pillars of the remarkable coalition the Tories assembled in 2019: prosperous voters in southern England who value economic stability above all, and working-class voters in the North and Midlands who combine cultural conservatism with leftist economic views.

Before Truss crashed the pound, Labour head Keir Starmer had an image problem – many perceived him as boring, lacking what former US president George H.W. Bush once referred to as “the vision thing”.

But now Starmer’s weakness has been transformed into a strength, said Michael Keating, an emeritus professor of politics at Aberdeen University: “The incoherence and incompetence of this Conservative government makes Starmer’s boring image look quite attractive. Boring is reassuring.”

Many Tory MPs have low expectations as they consider a new leader, Keating went on: “A lot of people are thinking about how to limit the party’s losses in the next election. They want to keep their own seats – although many are thinking it’s actually not a bad idea to go into opposition, because whoever wins the next election is going to have huge problems due to the economic circumstances.”

A ‘coronation’?

In this dire context, the Tories may well want a new leader matching Starmer’s blandly competent image. But that’s what they wanted last time: Conservative MPs favoured the technocratic ex-chancellor Sunak over Truss in the leadership battle. Yet the final round between the two was for party members to decide, and they swung in Truss’s favour.

Many Tory MPs see the party’s relatively old, largely southern members as a problem. They are “a load of loons in Maidenhead” (an affluent town near London), an anonymous senior Conservative told the Financial Times.

So rumours abound of what British politicos call a “coronation” – Tory MPs agreeing on a unity candidate, avoiding another members’ vote. There is a clear precedent, albeit from their time in opposition: in 2003 the parliamentary Conservatives ousted unpopular leader Iain Duncan Smith – chosen by members – and coalesced around Michael Howard as a unity figure to replace him.

However, the only coronation plan reported in the press is that Sunak-Mordaunt “joint ticket”. Both of them want to become prime minister and have the other serve as their deputy, according to The Sunday Times.

“A coronation is possible but unlikely given the number of Tory MPs who seem keen to take on the top job and therefore unlikely to allow one of their number to take it without a challenge,” Bale said.

No one stands out amongst Truss’s potential replacements. Sunak is the best-known after winning acclaim for his management of the Covid crisis as Johnson’s chancellor. He earned a bittersweet victory after Truss’s fiscal calamity vindicated his warnings. “Now we are basically implementing Sunak’s economic policy,” noted Sir John Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde.

Sunak lost that public popularity in April when he was fined for Partygate lockdown breaches along with Johnson – and when it was revealed that his multi-millionaire wife, Akshata Murty, benefitted from non-domiciled status, meaning she did not pay tax on income earned overseas while residing in the UK.

But despite the paucity of obvious successors to Truss, the Tory Party is famed for its ruthlessness towards unpopular leaders. When Johnson’s popularity plummeted in early summer, analysts also noted the lack of natural successors to him and reasoned that it didn’t matter – because Conservative MPs would find even flawed politicians preferable to a losing hand.

“At the moment, anyone would be better than Truss, which may mean some actually pretty average politicians being in the frame to succeed her,” Bale concluded. “But right now, average would be an achievement.”