Liz Truss’s faith in the power of markets will be tested to destruction by a winter of strife
Liz Truss enters Downing Street unencumbered by much expectation of success. Even the party that picked her is full of people whose first choice was someone else. Many of them think it should be the man she is replacing – the one who was discarded as a venal liar and an electoral liability.
Boris Johnson has a stake in Truss’s failure. The worse things get in his absence, the fonder he imagines the nation’s hearts will grow for him. He says he will support the new government “every step of the way” but he says all kinds of things. He once said there were no lockdown parties in Downing Street.
Truss’s authority over her party now has to be negotiated with MPs who think Conservative members chose unwisely, while relying on the loyalty of a faction that thinks there should never have been a contest in the first place.
Polls of non-Tory opinion show little confidence in the new prime minister’s ability to rise to the challenge. Her supporters say she can confound low expectations, citing as proof the fact that she has already outmanoeuvred the people who thought she was a loser. Whatever her deficiencies, she is demonstrably smarter at politics than a lot of her detractors.
The Trussites (Trussians?) say their candidate has the essential quality of effective prime ministers – pragmatism about the means to achieve goals that are set with unyielding conviction.
The creed is summarised by Mark Littlewood, director of the libertarian Institute for Economic Affairs, and a friend of the new prime minister, as an intuition “that the state has a greater propensity to do harm than good”. Kwasi Kwarteng, the new chancellor, has written that “Liz is committed to a lean state”, while preparing to throw tens of billions of pounds at the
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