Liz Truss is a liberal. So how will she approach immigration?

Should Tories already be feeling buyer’s remorse over their new leader? It has been only 20 days since Boris Johnson, a liberal who pretended to be a populist, was replaced by Liz Truss, a liberal who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a liberal. Whereas Johnson’s was a patrician liberalism with a keen sense of public opinion, Truss is an economic liberal with a swot’s enthusiasm and a swot’s grasp of human instincts. In short, the Tories have swapped a lazy dissembler for an ardent geek.

It’s not all they’ve swapped. The communitarian shift that began under Theresa May has been set in reverse and libertarianism has regained the upper hand in the Tory party. The decision to pursue supply-side fiscal reforms, specifically cutting the top rate of income tax to the Thatcher-achieved level of 40 per cent, is the most obvious sign of that, but there are others: cancelling the planned rise in corporation tax and scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses.