Liz Truss’s hulking challenges

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Good afternoon. To no one’s particular surprise, Liz Truss has won the Conservative leadership election. Some brief thoughts on the size of the challenge she faces in today’s second newsletter (our earlier edition, on chancellor-in-waiting Kwasi Kwarteng’s thinking, can be read here).

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

Liz get cracking

Why did Liz Truss win? The answer to that question is, in part, “well, when did the leadership election start?” Truss joked in her victory speech that the party had arranged the longest job interview in history, but the reality is that she has been running for the Tory leadership for much longer than the eight weeks of the campaign.

After the 2017 general election, a weakened Theresa May was unable to remove Truss from the cabinet but was able to demote her to the role of chief secretary to the Treasury. Truss, in private a Eurosceptic but someone who backed Remain out of loyalty to David Cameron, concluded two things from Jeremy Corbyn’s close-run race.

First, when it comes to the crunch, the country would always draw back from electing a Corbyn-style politician. But the second was that voters responded better to open ideologues willing to make a big political argument than conventional political wisdom thought.

She used the post of chief secretary to establish and spread her reputation among Conservative wonks and MPs as an unashamed rightwinger. She took personal control of her social media accounts and consciously remade her own image.

That meant that her endorsement — she was the first sitting cabinet minister to back Boris Johnson in 2019 — was highly prized in the last leadership contest. Her reward, the role of international trade secretary, meant that she was able both to deliver what the heavily pro-Brexit Conservative membership saw as unmitigated good news, but also keep away from the domestic controversies of the Boris Johnson era.

She emerged as the candidate of the right because Rishi Sunak, in many respects an impeccable rightwinger, had made himself unacceptable to that wing of the party thanks to his tax-raising budgets, and what many MPs perceived as his bungled handling of his own tax affairs.

Truss’s big assets are that she knows what she thinks, has a clear and confident sense of what she wants to do, and has proved consistently that she is able to play the game of Conservative politics as well as almost anybody.

Her biggest external problem is the size and scale of the crises facing the UK, which could break any prime minister. (As one veteran Conservative tells George Parker: “I’ve never known an in-tray like it for an incoming prime minister. Everything is in it apart from Armageddon.”)

She also has a hefty internal problem. Her success in making herself the candidate of last resort for the right of the party means she has to find space at her top table for a number of politicians whose administrative record is at best unproven, such as Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

While the government’s majority is large relative to the small or non-existent ones that Cameron and May had to contend with, it isn’t that large in historical terms: it’s around the same as the one Tony Blair had in his third term, and he had to retreat on 90-day detention and aspects of his public sector reform agenda.

It doesn’t help that the polls overestimated her lead. That you have commentators describing a 57 per cent to 43 per cent victory, a fairly emphatic result, as a “good one” for the defeated Sunak is mad. But it also reflects the sense among some of his backers that they are owed something because their candidate lost by “only” 14 points.

In her victory speech, Truss echoed Blair’s commitment to “govern as New Labour”, saying she had run as a true Conservative and would govern like one too. Now, some of the crises facing the UK probably do have authentically “conservative” answers to them, but not all. Having shown her ability over the course of her long, long campaign to tilt to one audience, success is going to hinge on her ability to take the party’s left along with her when she is a radical Conservative, and to avoid being brought down by the right when she tacks to the left out of expediency.

I am firmly on team “don’t underestimate Liz Truss: she’s smarter and wilier than you think”. But I’m also on team “don’t underestimate how bad the crisis facing the UK is”. It could break almost any prime minister and it may well break her too.