![Former prime minister Liz Truss](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2023/09/04/TELEMMGLPICT000342368937_16938369222180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwekapBZ1c_8650LP5YH00zA.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![Former prime minister Liz Truss](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2023/09/04/TELEMMGLPICT000342368937_16938369222180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwekapBZ1c_8650LP5YH00zA.jpeg?imwidth=680)
This week is the first anniversary of the start of the ill-fated Truss administration. With the luxury of a year of hindsight, what lessons or messages can we draw from her brief time in office?
Clearly Truss made mistakes. In my view the most serious of those was that she got herself elected on one platform – “No energy handouts” – but then as soon as she became Prime Minister did the precise opposite, announcing a massive and open-ended energy handouts package, while at the same time implementing the policies she’d said were the alternative to energy handouts – tax cuts. She was also not clear enough that the tax cuts she’d announced could only ever be temporary, unless there were also some combination of spending cuts and growth-enhancing policies that worked.
This is old ground, though with the perspective of an extra year of economic events we can see now that the Bank of England’s mistakes and the fundamental problems of UK growth and the Government’s budget deficit were at least as important drivers of financial market issues as any mistakes of Truss’ – after all, interest rates are now getting to be even higher than was feared before the “grown-ups were put back in charge” to replace Team Truss.
The decision the Tories made in replacing Truss wasn’t really about being “responsible” versus “financially reckless”, in the way her Tory opponents sought to characterise it. It was much deeper than that.
For those of us that came to political consciousness between the 1970s and the early 1990s, the Conservative Party seemed to be a radical reforming party. It took on vested interests. It took risks that did not always turn out well. In the language Truss used of herself, it “moved fast and broke things”. But that has not always been how the Conservative Party operated. Many of its historical governments were based, instead, on opposition to change or indeed on much of note happening at all. As Conservative PM the Marquess of Salisbury famously put it: “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.”
As well as Salisbury’s government, such inaction was notably characteristic of the government of Stanley Baldwin in the 1920s and 1930s. And it has been the central programme of the Tories since 2010. Most Tory voters and activists would struggle to identify any notable Tory reform that the Tories have brought about since 2010. The one notable change that has occurred - Brexit - was opposed by the Tory Party, both during the referendum and even after the vote.
The Truss government was a conscious effort to escape from that, to finally do something, to enact some Conservative reforms. And it was precisely because she wanted to change things that she was ousted. Tory MPs hadn’t avoided almost all change since 2010 because they wanted to move fast and break things. Precisely the opposite. They considered the situation from 2010 onwards as unstable, liable to degenerate into crisis at any moment, and that almost any change was reckless.
They regarded almost everything they had done as forced upon them by necessity. The rises in taxes; the deification of the NHS; the failure to reform public services; the failure to prevent the march of wokeness; the failure to control immigration; the failure to prevent climate change; the failure to make the economy grow faster; the failure to expand energy production; the failure to boost productivity; the failure to preserve liberty; the failure to build houses or other infrastructure; the failure to correct the constitution; the failure to keep Northern Ireland economically integrated with Great Britain – these and other failures were not the result of choices but of necessity.
Truss wanted to change all these things. But the Tory Party did not want change. So it ejected her and denounced her change agenda as reckless and naïve. But “Change as little as possible, for all change will be dangerous” is a policy platform that can scare people into voting for it only for a while. Eventually no change means no growth, no advance, and the festering of problems into poison. We can see now that by ejecting Truss the Tories gave up on all hope of winning the next election and indeed on having achieved anything Tory by way of reform in their 2010-onwards government. Truss failed, but at least she tried to do something. The rest of the Tory Party seems content to be most proud of having spent well over a decade doing nothing at all.
By ejecting Truss, the Tories gave up all hope of winning the next election
She may have failed, but the former Prime Minister at least attempted change. Voters will not reward the Party for just treading water since