How long can Liz Truss last?

This article is an on-site version of our Inside Politics newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter sent straight to your inbox every weekday.

Good morning. The biggest story in the UK at the moment is whether or not Andrew Bailey’s insistence that the Bank of England’s bond-buying operation will come to an end this Friday comes off or not. But that’s not my department, so I will confine myself to saying that Chris Giles has written an excellent piece on what Bailey is thinking and what the risks of his approach are and leave it at that.

Instead today I’m going to tackle two of the questions you ask an awful lot: how long will Liz Truss last, and what percentage figure do I put on that? Plus: some thoughts on the foreign affairs select committee election and what it means.

Inside Politics is edited by Gordon Smith. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to [email protected].

Going, going, gone?

Will Liz Truss lead the Conservative party into the next election? I highly doubt it: I put the chances she will be ousted before then at 90 per cent. Why? Well, because the polls continue to be really awful and I don’t think the Conservative party will go into an election in which it is forecast not only to go down to heavy defeat, but an election where it is risking extinction thanks to the brutal results that the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system is capable of producing when the polls look like, well, this:

Why only 90 per cent? Well, in part because while the Conservative party’s rule book makes it relatively easy for Tory MPs to get rid of a leader they don’t want, Conservative MPs have tended to bungle the execution. We should therefore be open to the possibility that they will bungle it so badly that they end up going into the next election led by a leader who is record-breakingly unpopular and who I don’t think anyone expects to be a particularly dynamic presence on the campaign trail.

They took the best part of a year to get rid of Boris Johnson, during which time he lost 336 Conservative councillors and two of the safest Conservative seats in the country, and longer still to get shot of Theresa May and Iain Duncan Smith.

When will it happen? Under the terms of the party rule book, Truss cannot face a confidence vote until a full year has elapsed since the start of her leadership. While there is a lot of appetite among Conservative MPs to change this, the benefits of doing so are enjoyed by all MPs, while the costs will fall very heavily on the MPs who actually do it, and I therefore assume this won’t happen. Over at the Times, Danny Finkelstein has written on multiple occasions about the “market failure for coups” and this thesis has generally performed well. I expect that it will continue to do so.

So, as a result, I don’t anticipate there will be a rule change and therefore I think there is a 50 per cent chance that Liz Truss will still be prime minister at the start of September 2023 (the earliest she could be removed under the terms of the current party rule book).

I am less certain of that than I was yesterday, given how unhappy and in some cases outright furious the Conservative MPs I spoke to last night were, and even less certain having read George Parker, Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe, Sebastian Payne and Jim Pickard’s account of the febrile mood within the party.

One asset Truss enjoys is that she still has a number of things she can sacrifice to keep her job. She can abandon her tax cuts entirely (I put that at an 80 per cent likelihood), sack her chief secretary Chris Philp (60 per cent), engage in a ritual purge of some or all of her Downing Street team (50 per cent) and her chancellor (30 per cent given he is such a close political ally). She can bring in some kind of respected figure from the past to steady the ship, be it William Hague, George Osborne or even someone who she has clashed with in the past, like Philip Hammond or Rishi Sunak.

Now, at this point, of course, you may reasonably ask: “Uh, Stephen, have you seen this alarming chart?”

And yes, one reason why I only put her chances of making it to September 2023 at 50 per cent is precisely because a lot of things could go wrong. She herself could voluntarily resign (10 per cent). She could be ousted by her party, whether by means of the rule book (10 per cent) or by other routes (30 per cent) and a big reason why that could happen is just how bad the UK’s economic position is. But ultimately to survive as leader Liz Truss doesn’t have to move quickly or take adequate steps to reassure markets: she needs to move enough that Conservative MPs who are in the hunt for reasons to delay the decision to remove her come up with excuses. When you consider that she is already trying to mollify markets a bit, I think she will do enough to appease Conservative MPs, at least long enough for her to make it until the autumn of 2023. Probably.

Keep Kearns and carry on

Alicia Kearns, the Conservative MP for Rutland and Melton, has been elected as chair of the foreign affairs Commons select committee, following Tom Tugendhat’s appointment as security minister. (You can see the full results here.)

It’s a major coup for Kearns, first elected in 2019, who comfortably defeated two former cabinet ministers in the shape of Liam Fox and Iain Duncan Smith, in addition to Richard Graham, a backbench Conservative first elected in 2010. (Select committee chairs are allocated based on the overall composition of the House of Commons, with various gigs reserved to various parties, hence the all-Tory field.)

Among other things, these elections are a good yardstick for where median opinion in parliament is. The most striking story here is the remarkable success of the China Research Group in particular, and Westminster’s China hawks in general, in making Sinoscepticism the mainstream position among MPs. Richard Graham, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on China and the closest thing to a dove in the race, finished a distant fourth. While it’s not quite fair to suggest that the six MPs who voted for Graham and then did not transfer to other candidates are the only remaining China doves in parliament, it’s also not a million miles from the truth.

It’s not the only reason why Kearns did so well — she fought a smart campaign and was well-placed to appeal to opposition MPs, and generally these elections favour MPs who can win support from their opponents because generally MPs in their own party will split pretty evenly among the field. It helped, too, that while Liam Fox has managed to win over a lot of new admirers outside the Conservative party since returning to the backbenches, where he has become a vocal campaigner on a wide swath of issues, both he and Iain Duncan Smith’s association with the Tory right did limit their appeal outside of the Conservative party.

But it also helped Kearns a great deal that she is a vocal and well-respected Sinosceptic.

Whatever happens to Liz Truss, and whenever it happens, Sinoscepticism is here to stay — and for the moment it is the power in the land at Westminster.

Now try this

I saw Don’t Worry Darling at the cinema. What can I say? I very much enjoyed Danny Leigh’s acerbic review, though I found the twist less irksome than Danny did, while quite agreeing that Harry Styles would have “improved the movie by not being cast at all”. (I very much regret that I had already booked my tickets to see My Policeman, another upmarket film starring Styles, who, if the trailer for that feature is any guide, does not fill that role any better than he does this one.)

But there are real delights: Florence Pugh is a terrific actor and she carries the film through some rather bad moments. There’s definitely a good 90-minute sci-fi thriller in there somewhere, but it’s very much a film that would have benefited from a good edit and a different leading man.

Top stories today

• Kwasi Kwarteng rejects calls for new ‘tax’ on UK banks | The chancellor has quashed calls to impose a new “tax” on Britain’s banks and raid what one banker called the “ultimate cash behind the sofa”.

• Supreme Court asked to dismiss Scottish case on second referendum | The Supreme Court was told it should dismiss the Scottish government’s request for guidance on holding an independence referendum at the conclusion a two-day hearing.

• RMT seeks mandate to continue strikes into spring | The UK’s biggest transport union asked its 40,000 members to back continuing a nationwide campaign of industrial action for a further six months, raising the prospect of further strikes on the railways over Christmas and into the new year.