Liz truss

Monday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The slumber of the Anglosphere

The countries we call Anglo-Saxon (Great Britain, the Commonwealth and the United States) have been known for centuries for their ability to govern themselves democratically, peacefully and efficiently. In the twenty-first century they have been doing less well. Britain and America are both in dreadful straits politically, economically and socially. The implosion of Boris Johnson and the search for a satisfactory successor have revealed the leadership of the Tory Party as a hapless and embarrassing collection of mediocrities devoid of coherent ideas. Across the Atlantic, one of the two major parties is a gerontocracy at the top and a gang of urban guerrillas with Molotov cocktails at its base.

anglosphere

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Conor Burns sacked from government

From our UK edition

In the past few minutes, Conor Burns has been told to leave the government after a complaint of 'serious misconduct' was made against him. Downing Street has released a statement saying:  Following a complaint of serious misconduct, the Prime Minister has asked Conor Burns MP to leave the government with immediate effect. The Prime Minister took direct action on being informed of this allegation and is clear that all ministers should maintain the high standards of behaviour – as the public rightly expects. No. 10’s press release is keen to stress that the Prime Minister took immediate action Burns was moved sideways by Liz Truss in the recent reshuffle, from Northern Ireland to the same Minister of State position in the International Trade department.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Crash course: how the Truss revolution came off the road

From our UK edition

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng wanted to shake things up. They were radicals in a hurry, keen to show that Britain was under new economic management. Theirs would be an unapologetic pro-growth agenda: no more genuflection in front of failed orthodoxies, no more being paralysed by fear or criticism. As a sign of this, they abolished the 45p tax rate for the highest earners: a move that many Tories longed to make, but did not dare. It seemed Truss and Kwarteng would leap in where other Conservatives feared to tread. This lasted just ten days. As the tax plan was reversed and No.

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

Will the free-market cause ever recover from Liz Truss?

From our UK edition

In theory, I should be delighted about the Liz Truss project. She is saying the things I’ve been arguing for years: talking not just about lower taxes but about basic liberty and how it relates to everyday life. She’s passionate about these ideas – and sincere. I remember watching her deliver a rallying cry, a salute to the ‘Airbnb-ing, Deliveroo-eating, Uber-riding freedom fighters’. This was just over three years ago when she was a Treasury minister. Her speeches were getting punchier and her one-liners becoming newsworthy and memorable. She was turning into one of the most recognisable faces of classical liberalism in Britain – a development which clearly delighted her. Truss asked for this job.

Katy Balls

Could it be Rishi by Christmas?

From our UK edition

What was supposed to be a recovery moment for the Conservatives instead looks like a collective nervous breakdown. The Prime Minister has been forced to U-turn on her flagship tax plan. Her cabinet is in open rebellion. Tory party conference resembled a civil war. The latest polling suggests the party is heading for electoral extinction. And that’s after just four weeks of Liz Truss’s premiership. ‘I know we have had a series of crises but this one really feels like the worst yet,’ says one seasoned government aide. Some Truss supporters are showing signs of buyer’s remorse. ‘I didn’t know it would be this bad,’ says one MP who backed her.

The Spectator

Give Liz Truss a chance

From our UK edition

Conservative governments have a habit of self-destructing: they die not in battle with political enemies but as a result of vicious infighting. It’s been less than three years since Boris Johnson’s triumphant 80-seat election victory, which seemed at the time to come close to condemning Labour to oblivion. Yet this week in Birmingham it was the Conservatives who have looked doomed, posing a far greater threat to each other than to Keir Starmer. In her conference speech, Liz Truss laid out a confident and coherent agenda. She is correct about the need to harness the power of free enterprise to kickstart growth, but she failed to prepare the ground for her agenda. Since entering No.

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

What did Kwarteng say to the free market think tanks?

From our UK edition

When Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng entered Downing Street, laser focus was not only applied to them, but also to the free market think tanks they had worked with over the years. This evening, Kwarteng paid a visit to two of them, as the Institute of Economic Affairs and The Taxpayers’ Alliance hosted the Chancellor at Conservative party conference for one-on-one conversations. Similar to his speech yesterday, Kwarteng used the opportunity to try to take some heat out of his mini-Budget. When asked if market reaction was part of the Treasury orthodoxy he and Truss had been taking aim against for weeks, he shook his head and pointed to the ‘global context’ instead.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Why Kwarteng’s next fiscal event will have to be brought forward

From our UK edition

In a tetchy performance on The Andrew Neil Show, Tory party chair Jake Berry repeatedly insisted that everyone would have to wait until the Chancellor’s unveiling of his fiscal plan on 23 November to find out whether or not there would be spending cuts and when the government believes it will hit its 2.5 per cent growth target. Berry’s performance, which involved repeatedly trying to answer a different question to the one he was asked, made it even harder to believe that this line can hold. If every minister interviewed for the next six weeks sounded like Berry did just now, then it would be a disaster for the government. https://twitter.com/Channel4/status/1576607943277019137?

Nick Cohen

The silence that reveals everything about Liz Truss

From our UK edition

The moorings that tie the rulers to the ruled are breaking in the UK. You can hear them snapping during the Prime Minister’s silences. On Sunday morning, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked Liz Truss a question any democratic leader should be able to answer. Truss and her Chancellor’s folly had sent yields on ten-year guilts up to 4.3 per cent. It had forced the Bank of England to announce an emergency £65 billion bond-buying programme. It had threatened pensions and the finances of mortgage holders. ‘How many people voted for your plan?’ asked Kuenssberg. Silence. A silence long enough for viewers to believe that concerns of democratic legitimacy had not bothered the Prime Minister in the slightest until that moment.

Steerpike

Now Nadine goes for Truss

From our UK edition

It's day one at Tory conference and already tensions are running high. Conservative MPs are coming out to attack Liz Truss's 45p tax cut, angry activists are muttering about mutiny and the markets are braced for more turmoil tomorrow. So who better than Nadine Dorries to calm the situation? Now relieved of her Cabinet post, the former Culture Secretary has time on her hands and she's certainly putting that to good use. Alongside an anguished Sunday Times interview today – in which Dorries bemoans the loss of Boris as 'one of the world’s great leaders' – the pugilistic parliamentarian has now taken to Twitter to turn her guns on Johnson's successor.

Friday

Nick Cohen

‘Liz Truss hasn’t understood a word I wrote’, says PM’s favourite author

From our UK edition

As I reported this summer, Liz Truss’s favourite historian is Rick Perlstein, the great chronicler of the rise of the new right in its Nixonian and Reaganite forms between 1960 and 1980. She told journalists that she read ‘anything’ he wrote. Interviewers noticed Perlstein’s books on her shelves. In a strange compliment to the American historian, Truss or sources close to her briefed The Spectator's Katy Balls with precise (if unacknowledged) quotes from his account of the rise of Ronald Reagan. I sent Perlstein my piece and asked for his thoughts. Let me put it like this: he may be her favourite historian, but she is not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000. ‘Liz. Can’t. Read.

Steerpike

Tory 2019 intake turns on Truss

From our UK edition

So much for the honeymoon. Liz Truss closes her first 'proper' fortnight of politics this weekend with her backbenchers in open revolt and talk already building of a mounting government U-turn. There have been plenty of damning verdicts on last Friday's 'mini Budget' but none more so than the YouGov poll which put Labour a whopping 33 points ahead of the Truss's Tories. And now Mr S brings news of fresh woe to the under-fire PM as she battles to save her premiership. A poll by Redfield and Wilton of Conservative voters at the 2019 election shows just how few were impressed with the headline measures of her first fiscal event. Nearly three times as many (56 per cent) oppose lifting the bankers’ bonuses cap versus 19 per cent who support the move.

James Forsyth

Why Liz Truss can’t back down

From our UK edition

Is there a way for the government to get out of the mess that it is in? This is the question obsessing ministers and Tory MPs. If the government doesn’t set out how it intends to square the circle, it’ll be risking more market mayhem. But as I say in the Times today, it is very hard to see a way out of this that is both politically palatable and economically possible. Nervous Tory MPs are being told by one of Truss’s cabinet allies ‘the solution is to be very tough on public spending’ A rapidly growing number of Tory MPs think the government should abandon or delay the abolition of the 45p tax rate. They believe that this would show the market that they were now behaving more responsibly.

Cockburn

Who REALLY blew up the Nord Stream pipelines?

Four days have passed since the Nord Stream pipelines mysteriously ruptured in the Baltic Sea, just outside of NATO territory. Sabotage is suspected. Many in the West blame Vladimir Putin; others, such as Tucker Carlson, Radek Sikorski and, er, Vladimir Putin, blame America. But to truly solve this mystery, Cockburn thinks circumstances require us to cast the net a little wider. Here are some potential saboteurs deserving of further scrutiny. Greta Thunberg How dare we! The gray Swedish doom-gremlin has dedicated much of the last years to warning us of the looming Armageddon, traipsing from the UN to Davos to COP26. Is it farfetched to suggest that Thunberg might take dramatic steps to ensure her cause is the only option on the table?

nord stream

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

What crisis? A tough week for Trussonomics

From our UK edition

What’s the sign of a successful Budget? Chris Philp, the new chief secretary to the Treasury, gave his answer moments after Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s statement last Friday: a strong pound. ‘Great to see sterling strengthening on the back of the new UK growth plan,’ he tweeted out. A (temporary) rising pound made sense to Truss supporters, who argued that markets would support their transition to a lower-tax, higher-growth economy. This was, they thought, their vindicating moment. The moment didn’t last. Within minutes, the pound had entered a steep descent and UK borrowing costs surged. But Kwarteng is not a politician who panics.

Matthew Parris

Maybe Nanny does know best

From our UK edition

Not least among the shivers down my spine as I listen to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng pump up the rhetoric on their economic revolution is the evocation of myself – myself when young. Like Ms Truss, I too joined the Liberal party as an Oxbridge fresher. I too believed in the power of personal choice. I too had a dream of unhindered competition liberating the animal spirits of enterprise and individual genius. I too told myself that we liberals must grit our teeth and keep the faith when sink-or-swim left some to sink. I too thrilled to the metaphor of ‘tall trees’ being allowed unencumbered access to the light.

Nick Cohen

Truss can’t hide from the crisis she created

From our UK edition

For a politician who only a few days ago was bravely mocking Vladimir Putin as a ‘sabre-rattling’ loudmouth ‘desperately trying to justify his catastrophic failures,’ Liz Truss has turned out to be the greatest coward ever to be prime minister. At least Putin feels the need to justify the catastrophe he has inflicted. Truss and her Chancellor believe they can hide away like children putting pillows over their heads to escape a bad dream, and say nothing at all. The public may not understand the full ramifications of the crisis the Conservatives have unleashed in a moment of ideological delirium.

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

Will Liz Truss take on the IMF?

From our UK edition

Tonight the International Monetary Fund has weighed in on the UK’s mini-Budget, offering a direct rebuke of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts. ‘We are closely monitoring recent economic developments in the UK and are engaged with the authorities,’ its spokesperson said, in reference to the fluctuating pound and rising borrowing costs. ‘Given elevated inflation pressures in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture' – suggesting some concern that the measures could be inflationary.

Monday

James Forsyth

Labour storm ahead of Tories in latest poll

From our UK edition

Tonight’s YouGov poll in the Times is brilliant news for Keir Starmer ahead of his conference speech tomorrow. It has Labour 17 points ahead, its biggest lead since the company started polling in 2001. These numbers, following the market reaction to the statement, are an awful start To be sure, the numbers reflect more voter disappointment with the government than a sudden bout of Starmer mania. Some 68 per cent of voters said the government was managing the economy badly. Only 12 per cent thought the ‘mini-Budget’ is affordable. Just 19 per cent said it was fair, against 57 per cent who thought it was not fair. And 69 per cent of those who voted Tory in 2019 opposed the scrapping of the 45p tax rate.

Stephen Daisley

Liz Truss is a liberal. So how will she approach immigration?

From our UK edition

Should Tories already be feeling buyer’s remorse over their new leader? It has been only 20 days since Boris Johnson, a liberal who pretended to be a populist, was replaced by Liz Truss, a liberal who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a liberal. Whereas Johnson’s was a patrician liberalism with a keen sense of public opinion, Truss is an economic liberal with a swot’s enthusiasm and a swot’s grasp of human instincts. In short, the Tories have swapped a lazy dissembler for an ardent geek. It’s not all they’ve swapped. The communitarian shift that began under Theresa May has been set in reverse and libertarianism has regained the upper hand in the Tory party.