Liz truss

Thursday

Richard Luckett

Who was George Canning? (1973)

Until Liz Truss, George Canning was the shortest-serving prime minister. He needn’t be forgotten by pub quizzers, general knowledge collectors and historians alike. In 1973, Richard Luckett reviewed a major biography of Canning’s life for The Spectator. Every schoolboy knows about the duel with Castlereagh; students of that neglected subject, abusive language, remember Brougham’s description of his behaviour over the Catholic question (‘the most incredible specimen of monstrous truckling for the purpose of obtaining office which the whole history of political tergiversation could furnish’); historians recall his reputation as an orator, his part in the decision to bombard Copenhagen, his divisive effect on Tory ministries, his forceful conduct of foreign policy

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Liz Truss had to go

The Liz Truss survival plan was, in the end, unworkable. She not only hired her enemies – Grant Shapps and Jeremy Hunt – but let them govern: tearing up her policies, while she held on in No. 10. She thought the Tory right had no candidate to replace her with and the Tory left would be happy because there had been a Cameroon restoration. So yes, it was a humiliation – but one that was supposed to keep her in post. The wheels feel off yesterday, and Truss had to accept that her game was over Could it last? Earlier this week I spoke to several MPs who could see Truss surviving

Wednesday

The Spectator

Divided they fall: can the Tories save themselves?

Seldom has support for a government fallen so far, so fast. Polls show that 24 per cent of the public would vote for the Conservatives if there was an election now, vs 52 per cent for Labour: figures that make 1997 look like a good result for the Tories. This is not just a one-off rogue poll, but the sustained average of six. It reflects what Tory MPs hear from voters appalled at the disgraceful shambles of the past few weeks. It won’t be forgotten in a hurry. This magazine gave its verdict on the Liz Truss agenda in August: ‘To attempt reform without a proper plan is to guarantee

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The lady vanishes: the Truss agenda is dead

‘Governments don’t control markets,’ the new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, likes to say. But there are times when markets control governments. The market, or the fear of how the market might react, is now the driving force in British politics. It explains the dramatic developments of the past week and will determine the new Prime Minister’s fate. Last month’s ‘mini-Budget’ was doomed because it required that the government borrow £70 billion more than had been planned. This money would have to be raised in the gilts market, and Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng assumed that the markets would be happy to continue to lend so much at such low rates. But

Peter Jones

Liz Truss and the art of rhetoric

Liz Truss was spot-on in arguing that the only way in which a state can flourish is by combining low taxes with economic growth. But she failed to persuade her audience that she knew how this could be achieved. If only Dr Kwarteng, a classicist, had drawn her attention to Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (4th century bc), the first full analysis of the means of persuasion, the day and her career would have been saved. First, Aristotle defined two general types of persuasive proof. One he called ‘artistic’, because it depended upon human ingenuity, the other ‘non-artistic’, because it derived from pre-existing evidence, e.g. witness statements, written contracts, etc. Then

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Truss says sorry, Hunt reverses mini-Budget and Kanye West buys Parler

Home Liz Truss said in a BBC interview as Prime Minister that she wanted to ‘say sorry for the mistakes that have been made’. Declaring that she would lead the Conservatives into the next election, she addressed blocs of MPs: the One Nation group one day, the European Research Group the next. She watched Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer whom she had just appointed to replace Kwasi Kwarteng, deliver a statement to the Commons reversing most of the provisions of the ‘fiscal event’ of 23 September. The new Chancellor announced the end of current subsidies for domestic energy bills in April, preferring something that ‘will cost the taxpayer

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Has a Conservative government got any power at all?

In the House of Commons on Monday, someone accused Liz Truss’s government of being ‘in office but not in power’. By chance, I was sitting in the peers’ gallery immediately behind the author of that famous phrase, Norman Lamont, who applied it to John Major’s administration in his resignation statement as chancellor in 1993. It grows ever more apt. I sometimes wonder if modern politicians positively welcome this situation. It is a general feature of the structures of the EU, where no elected politician has real power, but none seems to mind. Much of the joy of ‘compassionate’ Conservatives at the trouncing of Truss appears to derive from the proof

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Liz Truss survival plan

At the first stage of the Conservative leadership race, when Liz Truss was trying to win MPs’ support, her message was that she was the one who could ‘unite the right’. Now, her plan to survive in No. 10 relies on dividing the Tory left. Regicide is a messy business. ‘It’s very hard to push her out,’ says a former cabinet minister. ‘We would need to change the rules. It could be seen as an establishment stitch-up. I think she needs to do the right thing and resign.’ Everyone in the Tory party agrees that there needs to be a unity candidate when Truss goes, but there is absolutely no

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

What will the Halloween Budget bring?

Liz Truss did not think that spending cuts would be a major part of her agenda. She and her first chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, were confident that markets, having lent Britain billions of pounds to cover the cost of the lockdowns, would be more than happy to do the same to transform the economy. Their argument was, as it turned out, calamitously wrong. The miscalculation cost Kwarteng his job and the Prime Minister her power. Truss’s new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has dismantled almost all of her plans. ‘Trussonomics’ has been snuffed out. This temporarily calmed the markets. But abandoning tax cuts – as painful as it was – will soon prove

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Whips stay in post after a night of chaos

In a sign of how chaotic tonight has been for the Conservative party, I have now been told that the Chief Whip Wendy Morton and her deputy Craig Whittaker have not left the government after all. I have spoken to Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, who says: ‘I have just seen the deputy and he is categorical that neither he nor the chief have resigned.’ No. 10 has belatedly confirmed this too. Steve Baker seems to be the only minister trying to offer some kind of government line What seems to have happened is this. The whips instructed the party that the fracking vote would be a confidence issue this morning.

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: the reason top Truss aide was suspended

Embattled, humiliated and lampooned, Liz Truss has few public allies left. And she certainly has one less after today, following the suspension of Jason Stein, her acting director of communications in No. 10. Stein is a longtime supporter who managed much of Truss’s press operations during the summer leadership campaign. But shortly before PMQs the BBC reported that Stein had been suspended and is now due to face a formal investigation by the Propriety and Ethics Team in Whitehall. It follows a briefing in last week’s Sunday Times in which unnamed No. 10 sources had ridiculed the prospect of Sajid Javid replacing Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor. A source close to

Steerpike Steerpike

Liz Truss’s media strategy revealed

It’s the age-old dilemma for a media advisor when your politician is in a jam. How do you get out of doing an interview you really don’t want to do? Liz Truss’s former spad Kirsty Buchanan gave us an answer to that question to this morning when she revealed to the Whitehall Sources podcast just how her minister used to evade appearances on Question Time back when she was running the Ministry of Justice: Liz Truss when I worked for her, she obviously didn’t like the media so we used to spend quite a lot of time making up excuses and killing off minor members of her family so that

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Liz Truss apologises for the chaos. What next?

Finally, we hear from the Prime Minister. Liz Truss has given an interview to the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason. It comes at the end of a day in which she was accused of ‘hiding under a desk’ and emerged in the Commons only for a silent half an hour of blinking occasionally. She apologised, saying: ‘Firstly I want to accept responsibility and say sorry, for the mistakes that have been made.’ Truss did not appear comfortable this evening. It would have been weird if she did The Prime Minister has left others to argue that the government is still functioning. What she hasn’t done, until now, is offer any

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The effective PM has some difficult choices to make

Jeremy Hunt’s statement to the Commons underlined that he is now running the government. This wasn’t just evident from what he said, but from what was happening as he said it. The Chancellor spoke with the Prime Minister sitting behind him in silence, barely moving save to blink. Liz Truss had belatedly entered the chamber at the end of the Urgent Question that she had refused to answer herself, and then left half an hour later. But the statement also showed us quite how hard it is going to be for any caretaker leader, de facto prime minister or other figure to take the party back into a place where

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Has Hunt restored the government’s fiscal credibility?

Jeremy Hunt set out at the start of the weekend with one goal in mind: that when the gilt markets reopened on Monday, the cost of government borrowing would not surge further. Ideally, it would start to fall. In this sense, it’s been a successful day for the new Chancellor. The Treasury’s early morning update that a major fiscal announcement was about to be announced saw gilt yields start to drop when markets opened at 8 a.m. After Hunt’s overhaul of the mini-Budget – including the surprising decision to suspend the 1p cut to the basic rate of tax ‘indefinitely’ – they fell even further. After starting the day at

Steerpike Steerpike

Flashback: Truss promises ‘no new taxes’

Trussonomics is dead, long live Treasury orthodoxy. New Chancellor Jeremy Hunt unpicked the bulk of his next-door neighbour’s policy agenda on TV this morning, telling the nation that nearly all of the tax measures that have not started legislation would now be reversed. Income tax will now remain at 20 per cent ‘indefinitely’, the free on alcohol rates has been scrapped with only the National Insurance and Stamp Duty breaks surviving. Hunt also confirmed that he will go ahead with Rishi Sunak’s planned corporation tax increase next April from 19 per cent to 25 per cent.  It’s a dramatic break with Liz Truss’s promise in, er, August at the Tory husting

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Can you feel sorry for Liz Truss?

It is not easy to feel sorry for Liz Truss. She has a deeply unattractive streak of vanity – when in the Foreign Office, she seemed more interested in posing for the official photographers who trailed her round than she did in building relationships with the places she visited. She campaigned hard and sometimes dirty to obtain a job for which she was manifestly out of her depth. Once in that job, she exercised power with peremptory arrogance. She rewarded people who had sucked up to her, cast out anyone who had spoken up for her rival, and allowed experienced civil servants to be hoofed ruthlessly out of their jobs.

Sunday

Katy Balls

How long can Liz Truss hold on?

How much trouble is Liz Truss in? Just six weeks into her premiership, the Prime Minister’s economic plans are in tatters after she axed her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, reversed on her campaign pledge to scrap the scheduled corporation tax hike and brought in Jeremy Hunt as his successor. Now Hunt is calling the shots on the economy and he plans to reverse much of what the Truss government have announced so far, with tax rises and public spending cuts to come. Truss’s own supporters are privately asking what the point of her government is now. Unsurprisingly, this has all led to talk among Tory MPs that the end is nigh.

Lionel Barber

Jeremy Hunt is the ‘unity’ leader the Tories need

Liz Truss is now prime minister in name only: Jeremy Hunt, her chancellor of the exchequer, now holds power. He has repudiated her tax-cutting mini-Budget in a round of media appearances – his performances being far more convincing than Truss’s graceless eight-minute press conference on Friday. His admission that spending cuts will be needed and that ‘some taxes are going to go up’ to balance the books has injected a much-needed dose of realism. The question on everyone’s lips is: what will Hunt do now? Is he a stalking horse for a new PM (Rishi Sunak being the obvious candidate) or is the former head boy at Charterhouse himself a

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: first Tory MP calls for Truss to go

In office, Liz Truss promised to be the ‘disruptor in chief’. Unfortunately, most of that disruption has proved to be in the markets and the polls as her short-lived revolution tanked the standing of both her currency and her party. With Labour and mortgage rates on the rise, Truss’s authority has disappeared within days. She’s been forced to ditch her ideological soulmate Kwasi Kwarteng for Jeremy Hunt, the embodiment of Tory orthodoxy, and is now very much a prisoner of her party as they try to find someone – anyone – who can dig them out of their self-inflicted mess. Most of these discussions are happening behind closed doors as