James Forsyth James Forsyth

What Liz Truss got right

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issue 12 November 2022

Soon after Kwasi Kwarteng’s not-so-mini-Budget, I found myself in conversation with former aides to David Cameron and Boris Johnson respectively. They were both irritated by the way Liz Truss was being praised as a ‘true Tory’ in some Conservative circles, compared with her more cautious predecessors. One of them remarked, as the other nodded, that people will soon ‘find out there’s a reason why we didn’t do those things’.

Sure enough, the mini-Budget collapsed spectacularly and cost Truss her premiership. One of her mistakes had been simply to reject what had gone before, rather than to try to understand why compromises had been made. Her year-zero approach was one of the things that led to her being ejected from office so quickly. So it is worth taking some time to reflect on the things Truss was right about and that the new government should seek to build on.

Truss often stated when she was foreign secretary that the UK needed to do more to reduce its dependence on autocracies.

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