She's On Her Way

Update: Truss has sacked her ideological running mate, the Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. Astonishing after all of 38 days. The chaos wasn't his doing, it was theirs. I don't see this is changing what I wrote below only yesterday. (Today is14th Ocotober 2022.)

It's amazing how it works out. The Truss government never had legitimacy. The tiny selectorate could not be behind such a change of policy from centre-right Johnson to economic liberal (and reconstructed) right wing Truss.

She's crap at her job and so is Kwarteng. You wouldn't think he was a hedge fund manager because he comes across as someone without experience. You wouldn't think she had been in the cabinet so long, but then as Foreign Secretary her legacy is having opportune photographs taken.

You get that moment when suddenly authority drains away. After just a month in the job it's happening again, as it did with Johnson. This time, if there is no General Election, the Tory Party has to obey the rules of Parliamentary democracy and the Members of Parliament approve the people put in power.

Truss will not only not win a General Election; she will sink the Tory party ship. Maybe the Tories just have to accept that they are going to lose. The reason Patel did not stand for the leadership was because she knew the next leader would lose and be sacked. Better to be chosen as opposition leader, set out your stall and make the appeal to the voters.

The non-Budget that was a Budget can be reversed in part or whole, but the damage is done. The idea that taxes should be cut when the NHS is flat on its back, the court system is disintegrating, and there is no improvement in productivity, and when so many people are sick, is madness. Growth comes from investment, not from fiscal measures that cause stricter and contradictory monetary measures. Johnson at least knew that money had to be spent.

This has been a lesson in Jeremy Corbyn too: he did not have the support of MPs for his far-reaching radical project. It was sourced in the swollen Labour Party membership of that time. Liz Truss is a Jeremy Corbyn, and she is the wrong person at the wrong time with the wrong ideology.

Authority is slipping away and so goodbye. Bizarrely, the constitution is working.