‘A constitutional outrage’ writes Julia Langdon

Image above: Liz Truss at the Conservative Party Conference

Report by Julia Langdon

Reproduced with the kind permission of The Tablet, where it was first published.

Behind the fury provoked by the chaotic policy reversals of the government led by Liz Truss lies something even more serious – an executive with no mandate

It is the playwrights and the historians who are going to get the most fun out of what is happening in British politics today. Perhaps James Graham is already
on the case and in a year or two we will be rocking in our seats at a stage or television portrayal of the everyday drama that currently passes for government.

The historian will require more perspective, of course, for an analysis worth its weight in wisdom, but in the meantime maybe there is also another Sasha Swire out there, making a careful note of who said what to whom and keeping an eye on their choice of wallpaper.

We should never underestimate the importance of the wallpaper, whoever’s paying for it, eh Carrie?

Or is it just possible that Michael Gove, with his sharp pen and acute understanding of the absurd, has himself been keeping a diary? Oh, do let it be so! He is a journalist, after all, and even a modest daily commitment of a couple of lines a day would guarantee the diary keeping him in due course.

“Had tea with the prime minister. She wants to send me one-way to the Middle East. Israel and Abu Dhabi mentioned. Booked ‘Lunch with the FT’ instead. Calves liver with treacle bacon at the Half Moon should give her the answer.

“Not to mention – what, 4,000 words of piety with occasional references to growth, all over page 3 of the Pink ‘Un’s readable section? Ha!”

According to one of the sons of the late John le Carré, interviewed about the imminent publication of the novelist’s letters, his father would have “laughed in a furious way” about our politics now. He would have regarded it as “high, dark comedy”.

But is anyone really laughing? The political party conferences have been comic in their own way: Labour because it was so uncharacteristically pacific.

The days are long gone since they called each other “brother”, “sister” and “comrade”, but this seemed once again to be the party of fraternity and what used to be called “TIGMOO” (This Great Movement Of Ours).

They held their collective breath in order to avoid saying the wrong thing and, by and large, almost succeeded.

Even when the leadership lost a vote to the conference floor, it was because the delegates supported proportional representation – which even the Daily Mail could not attribute to the horny-handed sons of Marxist ideologues.

Besides, even though Keir Starmer declared that the subject would not be a political priority, nor included in their next election manifesto, he will have recognised that PR is a useful party commitment to have in his back pocket should he find himself in coalition talks with the Liberal Democrats any time soon.

By way of contrast, the Conservative conference was so profoundly bizarre that it was – well, funny peculiar. Its traditional dull displays of ritual loyalty were confined to a few hours in the conference hall, while the rest of the four-day event was seething with interparty hostility and political point-scoring.

The “representatives” at the conference – they are not delegated in any way – were as well behaved as might have been expected.

The same could not be said of those politicians who chose to attend, with even Cabinet ministers calling each other out in public and almost everybody renouncing parts of the most recent manifesto on which they were all elected.

What gives them that right? And what gives Liz Truss the authority she has been attempting to assert to do just whatever she wants when she has only been chosen by 81,000 members of the Conservative Party in a UK electorate of 46.5 million voters?

Here we have the nub of what is not at all funny about the new British government. However you look at it, this is a constitutional outrage.

Liz Truss was elected in 2019 as an MP on a manifesto that she has now, as the new prime minister, effectively rejected in favour of a set of policies that are wholly different.

We call ourselves a representative democracy, yet we now have a prime minister whose only mandate for office is the one on which her predecessor as Conservative leader was elected to govern – but who apparently believes it is nevertheless her right to make up policy on the hoof.

The row on benefits uprating is a case in point. Boris Johnson, as prime minister, had publicly committed his government to increasing benefits in line with inflation – equivalent to an increase of about 10 per cent – as opposed to earnings, which would be an increase of about half that figure.

Liz Truss undertook to guarantee the higher increase on pensions in the course of the leadership election. As soon as she was asked about this, once in office, she prevaricated about a universal increase and, initially, refused to be specific about the scale of the increase.

Now I do not mean to suggest that Johnson can be held up as an exemplar of honourable political behaviour, still less as someone who observed his own commitments. He trashed his own manifesto pledges with utter disregard.

But even though our constitution is famously “unwritten”, my A-level in British Constitution suggests that if the words “representative democracy” have any meaning, a prime minister who succeeds another in the same parliament should be bound by the obligations on which the first was elected.

None of this seems to matter much to Ms Truss. In advance of MPs returning to Westminster – at last! – Downing Street embarked upon a so-called “charm offensive” to try to reset the clock on the new administration.

After a honeymoon from hell, certainly the worst first weeks of any government in living memory, this looked like a flicker of contrition.

Having already been obliged by the force of public and political opinion to change her mind on the tax rate paid by the highest earners, the world was informed that the prime minister had learned from what had happened and would seek to engage more widely in future.

The new “iron lady” is, after all, prepared to be moulded a bit – at least, it seems, on the benefits issue.

But she had little choice. The forces arrayed against her are formidable: inside parliament, where she was not, in any case, the parliamentary party’s preferred candidate as leader and where she has since alienated others by

her didactic style; and outside parliament in the marketplace of public opinion.

Indeed one of the many extraordinary things about our present political circumstance is the number of people, organisations, interest groups and sections of society who find themselves not only distinctly unamused by the government but, in many cases, now unaccustomedly hostile to it.

These categorisations include the young, the old, benefit claimants, civil servants, farmers, health service workers, pharmacists, many of those who voted Conservative for the first time in northern “red wall” seats in 2019 and many of those in southern “blue wall” seats who have been voting Conservative all their lives.

If you add in former chancellors, former prime ministers, transport workers, Uncle Tom Cobley and (unexpectedly) people who live in townhouses, you begin to get a measure of what Liz Truss is up against.

This marketplace is now producing successive opinion polls that give the Labour Party a 30-point lead. The dull is outscoring the didactic.

But if all that is not bad enough, there is the other market – the financial one that got so spooked by the implausible financing of Ms Truss’s fancies that it forced the Bank of England to intervene to shore up the bedrocks of our economy and which remains in a state of jittery uncertainty.

The new prime minister presented herself during the ridiculous exercise that was the Tory leadership campaign as the “continuity” candidate.

It was an attempt to attract the votes of those in the Conservative Party who still believed that Boris Johnson was a worthy leader, but it was a sham. She did not even acknowledge his leadership – or the stonking majority he won in 2019 – in her first conference speech as party leader.

Similarly, she has tried to don the mantle of Margaret Thatcher: determined, confident and resolute. But this too is erroneous and inaccurate, as Thatcher’s surviving acolytes have swiftly pointed out.

Thatcher was prepared to be unpopular but her caution was such that she never risked upsetting the financial markets. Her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, recalled recently that it was seven years before she felt that at last her policies were beginning to work.

Liz Truss hasn’t got anything like that long. She will be laughed out of office just as soon as a means can be found to manage it.

Julia Langdon is The Tablet’s lobby correspondent. Formerly political editor of the Daily Mirror and The Sunday Telegraph. Julia lives in Chiswick.

Read more stories on The Chsiwick Calendar

See also: Truss is finished, so are the Tories writes Peter Oborne

See also: Liz Truss is “worlds apart” from Cadbury’s legacy, says Ruth Cadbury

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