For almost a fortnight, the British Conservatives will keep the nation in suspense. Then, after long weeks of uncertainty, it should finally be officially clear who will succeed the outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson as party and government leader. According to the polls of around 160,000 Tory party members who are eligible to vote, everything has already been decided: According to Glasgow politics professor John Curtice, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s victory is “95 percent” certain. Truss would have to make “spectacular mistakes” to defeat her rival Rishi Sunak, according to the doyen of British polling research.
The prospect of the 47-year-old’s victory alarmed many former party leaders. Over the weekend, longtime minister and Brexit pioneer Michael Gove threw his weight behind Truss’s rival Rishi Sunak: the foreign secretary’s election campaign represented “a break from reality”; in particular, the planned tax cuts, a favorite topic for Tories, would relieve wealthy managers rather than help the poorest in society.
Former party leader Michael Howard had already formulated this harder: The 81-year-old spoke of “political suicide”. In fact, the population is afraid of huge energy bills this fall; many of the worst affected pay hardly any taxes anyway due to generous allowances, and are instead dependent on state aid. Labor opposition wants to suspend forthcoming price hikes; promptly the Labor Party (43 percent) is clearly ahead of the completely self-absorbed governing party (28 percent) in the polls.
The members of the incumbent government shrug their shoulders and point to the coming leadership, probably under Truss. The foreign minister is so sure of victory that cabinet lists have been circulating for a long time and the previous career of the favorite is checked for mistakes and omissions. Truss has shown “appropriate loyalty” under three prime ministers, according to the malicious judgment of “Spectator” journalist Katy Balls. Will that be enough to demand loyalty in hard times from a group in which the candidate was not even able to convince a third of the MPs?
The doubts about Truss were expressed most brutally by a former colleague of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-90). Truss is “dangerously impulsive and stubborn,” Matthew Parris told The Times: “She has massive hubris and huge ambition, her political mind is the size of a pinhead.” As with Johnson, the government will be busy trying to get the fickle PM into Keeping check: “It’s not completely tight, it won’t work.”
Stubbornness could certainly work to the advantage of a principled leader, impulsiveness may just be a cliché attributed to women in politics. On the other hand, there are numerous examples of the foreign minister’s fickleness.
In the Brexit referendum campaign, the central issue of British domestic and foreign policy, she fought for remaining in the EU in 2016, calling the Leave campaign “extreme and yesterday’s”. In the meantime, no one can surpass her in her enthusiasm for the break with Brussels. At the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Truss encouraged British volunteers to go to the front for Kyiv, which caused alarm in the Ministry of Defense. The chief diplomat quickly had to deny herself. At the beginning of August, she advocated a greater regional distribution of salaries in the public sector – until critics made it clear that this meant salary cuts for police officers, doctors and nurses in the poorer regions of the country. Truss hastily withdrew the idea.
The fact that the previous Brexit chief negotiator wants to terminate the Northern Ireland Protocol and thus a binding international agreement with the European Union may inspire local Protestant hardliners. The inevitable economic turbulence is more likely to fuel the appetite of many Northern Irishmen for reunification with the Dublin Republic. Truss slammed SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon as an “attention seeker” who she would simply ignore. That would not be possible for a prime minister because Sturgeon is the undisputed prime minister in Edinburgh. In addition, the statements are politically foolish because they bring additional support to the pro-independence camp in Scotland.
None of this seems to be able to stop Truss, not even the zealous support of the incumbent prime minister and his closest associates. Johnson may have long been discredited in the country, and many Tories mourn his loss – and are therefore voting for the “Boris continuity candidate”, despite all warnings.
