If you are in politics and want a friend, get a dog. When Liz Truss was making her fateful advance on Downing Street, her friendship with Kwasi Kwarteng was touted as the foundation stone and guarantee of the successful programme they would deliver. Close, extremely close, both politically and personally, they certainly were. Give these passionate allies and ideological bedfellows the two most powerful jobs in Britain and what could possibly go wrong?
Absolutely everything. They are a textbook example of why friendship can be a terrible basis for relationships at the top of government, especially when it is fused in a mutual intoxication with recklessly utopian theories and a contempt for the opinions of anyone outside a little echo chamber occupied by a narrow sect of believers. The result was the maxi-disaster of the mini-budget that has inflicted so much financial carnage on Britain and reputational ruin on the Conservative party.
It is barely more than three weeks since we watched Mr Kwarteng swagger up to the dispatch box to claim that he possessed a miraculous concoction to rejuvenate Britain while Ms Truss sat beside him jeering and gurning at the many critics who forecast that a borrowing binge to pay for tax cuts would end in bitter tears. The fabled elixir duly transpired to be snake oil laced with poison. The markets gagged and the public were horrified. Now she has been impelled to sacrifice him in a grim gambit to save herself. Greater love hath no woman for the premiership than to lay down the life of her bosom friend in an attempt to save her own skin.
This was more an act of feverish desperation than one of cool calculation. I guess she thinks that firing him might buy her a bit more time at Number 10, but time to do what exactly except wait for Conservative MPs to organise her removal? She sank even further down in her party’s already low estimation during the excruciating news conference she gave after jettisoning both her chancellor and another chunk of their disintegrating plan. Despite this latest humiliating reverse, she offered neither acknowledgment of nor contrition for the havoc her government has unleashed. She expressed herself “incredibly sorry” to “lose” Mr Kwarteng as if someone else had chucked him under the bus. She was simply in denial for a lot of the brief time she stood at the podium, insisting that the “mission remains” when we can all see that the rocket has blown up on the launchpad.
Her hope must be that overboarding her old friend draws a line under the most catastrophic start to a modern premiership, but that would require everyone to believe he was solely culpable for what everyone knows was a crazy gamble that they jointly conceived and promoted. Mr Kwarteng was sacked not because he failed to deliver what Ms Truss expected. He was fired because he did exactly what she wanted him to do and it then exploded in their faces. His resignation letter had a tone that was surprisingly forgiving, but we will see how the former chancellor feels after he has had a few days to brood on being dispatched so brutally after just 38 days in post. That makes him the second briefest chancellor after Iain Macleod in the 1970s and he had the excuse that he died of a heart attack. Mr Kwarteng’s credibility is in shreds, but he will have a large and enthusiastic audience if he decides to repay Ms Truss in the same coin. In the view of one former Tory cabinet minister: “If he turns on her, he can destroy her.”
It is another sign of how enfeebled the prime minister has become that she offered the chancellorship to Jeremy Hunt, the type of experienced, centrist Tory she has previously and repeatedly scorned as a slave to “abacus economics” and “Treasury orthodoxy”. Once Mr Hunt had failed in his own bid to become Tory leader, he gave his support to Rishi Sunak whose warnings to his party about the perils of a Truss premiership have been so comprehensively vindicated. Mr Hunt’s appointment is a belated recognition – far too belated to revise opinions of Ms Truss among Tory MPs – that she ought to have reached out to other factions of her party when she first became prime minister.
Mr Hunt is the fourth – fourth! – Tory chancellor in the space of just four months. Caretaker managers of relegation zone football clubs enjoy greater life expectancy. He must draw up a convincing new fiscal plan and has very little time to do it. Scheduled to be unveiled at the end of the month, this will be a make-or-break moment for the new chancellor, for Ms Truss, if she manages to stagger on that far and for what remains of the Tory party’s reputation as a steward of the economy. Mr Hunt is going to have to display a touch of genius if he is to come up with a formula that restores faith in Britain in debt and currency markets, ameliorates the discontent of the public or at least prevents it from getting any more severe, and soothes the furies of Tory MPs.
The prime minister went for the easiest of the U-turns available to her when she ditched her pledge to hold down corporation tax. Most companies will happily pay more to the exchequer if that calms volatility in the markets. There is still a huge hole in the government’s finances that the new chancellor is somehow going to have to fill. To make the sums add up, he will have to abandon more of Ms Truss’s unfunded tax cuts or outline real-terms reductions in public spending or, most likely, propose a combination of both. Having just sacked one chancellor, her position is far too precarious to risk losing another one. That gives Mr Hunt a huge amount of potential clout. If he wants to pursue a strategy that is more aligned with that proposed by Mr Sunak during the leadership contest, then the prime minister will not be able to resist him. One former Tory cabinet minister remarks: “If Jeremy goes to her and says, ‘Sorry, we’re going to have to postpone the 1p income tax cut’, she won’t be able to say ‘no’.” A longstanding ally of Mr Hunt thinks: “He’s in a very powerful position. She’s going to have to do what the Treasury says. I don’t think she’s got any choice.” For connoisseurs of political ironies, this is one to savour. Ms Truss is now trussed. She is the prisoner of the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, the very institutions she used to deride as “bean counters”.
Which has everyone, even the tiny minority who wanted her to be prime minister, asking: what is the point of her now? Her defining economic project has been rejected by markets, the public and her own MPs and she is being forced to junk its central planks. Does she look like an election winner? Hardly. The polls say the Tory party faces electoral annihilation. Does she have a mandate to be in Number 10 from the public? That’s a negative and forgetting this was one of her many mistakes. Does she even have a mandate from the Tory activists who put her there? Not any more, not now that she has been forced to mince her prospectus because contact with market and political realities have exposed the promises she made as the fairytales they always were. Does she enjoy the confidence of Tory MPs? Clearly not. The majority never wanted her and an even fiercer anger is felt among the minority who did because they liked her “pro-growth”, low-tax, small-state agenda. This group on the right are feeling betrayed because their lifetime convictions have been discredited by her calamitous attempt to put them into practice.
Even at his grisly end, Boris Johnson still had a constituency among Conservative MPs made up of those who thought they were better off keeping him in Number 10. There is no remaining constituency for Ms Truss. If Tory MPs possessed a wand they could wave to make her vanish, they’d instantly use it.
They don’t have a magical way out of their dilemmas. So there will now be a lot of agonised scheming about how to rid themselves of a zombie prime minister without making the Tory party look even more absurd or creating irresistible pressure for a general election. I think she’s finished. The outstanding question is how they will finish her off. It won’t be a regicide.
It will be an act of euthanasia.
Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
