The fall of Liz Truss, and the nature of political authority

The short and ill-starred premiership of Liz Truss will be remembered for many things, more indeed than quite a few other (and by default longer-lasting) tenures at the top. It will naturally form the material for innumerable pub quizzes in the future – who was prime minister for the shortest time, who was compared to a lettuce, and so on. And it has already spawned a number of cutting epithets, including “the sub-prime minister”, “the prime mini”, “not so much the Truss era as the Truss error”, and – my favourite because of the cross-reference to the excellent 1960s film “Anne of the Thousand Days” about Anne Boleyn – the phrase “Liz of the Thousand Hours”.

More seriously, future generations of politics students will study and debate how she managed to lose so much authority and control quite so quickly and quite so completely. By the end of her premiership it was hard to find many MPs, on either wing of the Conservative party, who were genuinely supporting her: even the libertarian hard right of the party, her natural supporter base, had it seemed largely given up on her.

I think there are two parts to this question: how she lost her authority, and what the basis for her authority was in the first place. I will consider them in turn.

There are innumerable ways for a prime minister to squander his or her authority in the House (and Boris Johnson found a few new ones to add to the list), but in essence they boil down to just two – poor policies, ie the pursuit of policies the parliamentary party does not support (which did for May), and poor politics, ie the interpersonal and presentational skills any leader needs (which did for Johnson).

Liz Truss should have been well aware of this. It was no secret that she was not the first choice of her fellow MPs: at the first ballot of MPs she only got 50 votes and at no time did more than a third of the parliamentary party back her. She ought also to have known, if only from the sustained attacks on her fiscal proposals during the interminable leadership campaign, that her policies were not mainstream and not supported by most of the MPs. And finally she also should have noticed that her party was in a fragile and febrile state: many of her fellow MPs were (and still are) under huge stress, as their workplace has become a madhouse, the backbiting among colleagues is intense, they do not know who to trust or who to believe, and all the time the media is overtly scornful of the shambles of their party and their inboxes are groaning as their constituents weigh in with mounting concern over everything but especially the cost of living. The Parliamentary Conservative Party is not at the moment a happy lot.

This should have put her on double alert. She should have realised that she needed to win over her fellow MPs both to her personally as a credible leader, and to her policies as a credible strategy for the government. A wiser person would have made both an early priority. Instead she seems to have gone out of her way to ignore her MPs, cutting most of them except her inner circle out of the communications loop, and then blindsiding them and indeed the whole country with a fiscal statement that was, to say the least, unexpected and poorly telegraphed.

At heart, therefore, Truss lost her premiership through bad politics. She combined an arrogance that she alone was right with an ignorance of the facts of political life which has few parallels in modern times.

This is not to say that her policies were blameless. Markets certainly took against the tax proposals in the mini-budget and the implied fiscal deficits very strongly, and her failure to manage the fallout from that was a major second factor in her downfall.

Whether the policies would actually have worked, we may never know. Because they were so quickly rejected, first by the markets and then by new chancellor Hunt, the policy mix Truss wanted to implement remains untried – and to a large extent now, untryable. Indeed it is this as much as anything that turned her natural supporters against her, with the result that she was left with neither wing of her party backing her – the centre-right against her because they disagreed with her policies, and the far right because while they might have liked the policies, they were furious at the clumsy way she introduced them and thereby set back their cause a decade or more. No-one on the libertarian wing of the Conservative party will now dare to propose anything resembling “Trussonomics” for many a year.

Having discussed how she lost her authority, I turn now to the second of my two points, the nature of that authority in the first place.

I shall start by exploring one thing that was repeatedly mentioned in her time at No.10, the question of her “mandate”; or rather, her lack of it. This phrase was shorthand for the criticism that since many, indeed most of her policies were not in the Tory party’s manifesto for the 2019 election, in some sense she had no right to pursue them. For example the BBC’s political journalist Laura Kuenssberg, when interviewing Truss, asked the pointed question “Prime Minister, who voted for this?” (a remark which completely floored Truss, which at the very least shows woeful preparation for a very obvious question), and the issue even arose at Truss’s own party conference. The inference was very clear: the electorate had not sanctioned her policies at the ballot box and so, it was argued, she had no right to introduce them.

But in my view this is a false assessment. Governments frequently enact policies which were not in their manifesto. Our politicians are elected to lead the country and solve our problems, and that includes both having proactive policies (ie, what they do if they are free to act) and reactive policies (ie, what they do in response to external events). The former are often included in a manifesto, but the latter are often not, and if politicians were entirely limited to what was in their manifestos, governments would be frozen into impotence by unforeseen events.

There was no mandate for the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, or the mass vaccinations, or the furlough schemes – of course there wasn’t, because no-one foresaw the pandemic when the 2019 manifestos were written. But who would argue that government should not have acted in the face of Covid simply because “there was no mandate for it”?

Equally, there is no mandate for the current military and diplomatic support for Kyiv, or for the energy support package – again, because no-one foresaw Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine or the consequential quadrupling of gas prices. But that does not make the policies wrong, and even less does it make them illegitimate.

At heart Britain, like most western democracies (though not Switzerland, for example), operates a Representative Democracy, in which MPs are asked to think on our behalf, not a Delegate Democracy, in which they are merely asked to enact our commands. That is how trades unions work, not parliaments.

So Truss was in my view entitled to argue that the economic position she inherited was so different from that of 2019 that it required radical action, including action not in the 2019 manifesto. It is not a strong argument, as it leads to the rebuttal “if things are that different, ask us again at a general election”, but it is a defence she could have made. More importantly, the general point is that statements in a 3 year old manifesto (or their absence from it) do not bind a politician today, even one trying a very different approach as Truss was.

So what was Truss’s authority based on? The answer to this revolves around the fact that she actually held two positions: Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. And the positions are not quite the same. This may seem semantics, but although it is no longer possible to conceive of the leader of the party with a majority in the House of Commons not also being prime minister, the difference does nevertheless exist[1]. And one important place where they differ is in how the incumbent is chosen or decided.

The Conservative Party is a private club, and is entitled to set its own rules for electing its leader. It has chosen to do so by vote of its membership, but it could choose its leader by any other method it wanted, for example by age or seniority, or even by drawing lots (the cynic might comment that such a ballot could hardly be less successful).

But the position of prime minister is different; it is a public position, and subject to the British Constitution, which although famously unwritten, is not non-existent. And in the British Constitution, the premiership is (at least in theory) “at the invitation of the sovereign”, who formally asks the prime minister to form a government, and the understanding is that the monarch will only invite someone who can command the confidence of the House of Commons.

In practice of course the Queen (for Truss was appointed before Queen Elizabeth’s death, just) had no autonomy in the matter – it would have been brave to the point of extreme foolishness for her to even hint at questioning Truss as to the degree to which she had the required “confidence of the House” – but that support of their fellow MPs is nevertheless the basis for any prime minister’s position.

So, the real issue at the heart of the collapse of Truss’s authority is that she was chosen by one electorate (the party membership), but needed the support of a different one (the parliamentary party). And while MPs will in general try very hard to support their party leader – witness the contortions many moderate Labour MPs went through to support Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership – there is a limit. And when that limit is reached the party leader has nowhere to turn, no authority left. Because in the final resort, the support of the party membership counts for little against the requirements of the Constitution and the conduct of the business of government in the House.

In the end, therefore, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Truss was the wrong person, with the wrong policies, chosen by the wrong electorate.

To their credit, the senior members of the Conservative Party saw this and with brutal speed put all three right – a different person, with different policies, elected (by judicious finessing of the party rule book) by a different electorate. Now all they have to do is make the rulebook change permanent and remove the “wrong electorate” from the process for good.

None of this is to say that the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, will have an easy time. The same challenges are still there – a sclerotic economy facing both inflation and huge deficits, and an international situation that is about as hazardous as at any time since the Cuban Crisis 60 years ago. But at least he has that precious thing Truss never had – the authority to govern, derived from holding (for the moment at least) “the confidence of the House”.

As for Truss herself, it would be hard not to have some sympathy for her. However hopeless she turned out to be, however naive and out of her depth, however many mistakes she made, to have one’s whole life implode so completely and so quickly – and in public too – is a hard and bitter fate. What does she do now? – at 47 she could be only halfway through her life. And how does one answer the fact that there have been worse, and certainly far more venal, politicians who have not received anything like such an annihilation?

Tough world, politics. But I don’t think anyone has ever been destroyed quite so brutally before. And I suspect she still has no real idea why she was quite so singled out.

 

[1]    Truss herself fully understood the difference between the two roles. In her short resignation speech outside No.10 she pointedly said “I resign as leader of the Conservative Party … I shall remain Prime Minister until a new leader is elected”.