Liz truss

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.

Liz Truss is ready to be unpopular. Or at least that is what the new Prime Minister is keen to suggest. On a media round from New York – where she is attending her first international summit since entering No. 10 – she told the BBC's Chris Mason: If that means taking difficult decisions which are going to help Britain become more competitive, help Britain become more attractive, help more investment flow into our country, yes, I'm absolutely prepared to make those decisions. 'Yes, yes I am', was how she answered Beth Rigby's question about whether she was prepared to be unpopular. Is this significant? Well, it points to two things.

Since becoming the Tory leadership favourite early last month, Liz Truss is used to all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork. Old friends, former allies and even the odd foe have been very keen to share their opinions on Truss, the onetime Lib Dem radical turned Brexit-backing cabinet mainstay. But one person who we haven't heard much from is Mark Field, her fellow former Conservative MP, with whom Truss had a headline-grabbing affair in the mid-2000s. But now the Camden New Journal have set tongues wagging with a cheeky little piece in this week's edition about what Field has been up to since leaving parliament in late 2019.

Today’s energy bills announcement was the first really important moment of Liz Truss’s premiership so far – and may prove to be the most important one of her entire tenure. Kate has a run-down of the details of the policy here, but what the plan to freeze the average energy bill at £2,500 a year means politically is that there is a clear dividing line between the Truss government and Keir Starmer’s opposition – a line both of them are very happy to thicken.  A striking thing about Truss’s manner is that she goes headlong into the arguments of her opponents before they’ve even had a chance to raise them.

Liz Truss has started to appoint supporters of her leadership campaign rivals to ministerial positions, answering the demand (mostly from said supporters of her leadership campaign rivals) to ‘reach out’ across the party to bring the Conservatives back together. There are Rishi Sunak backers in the latest slew of jobs – Robert Jenrick returns to government as health minister, Jeremy Quin goes to the Home Office, Mark Spencer to Defra and Victoria Prentis goes to DWP – along with two who had previously backed Kemi Badenoch (Rachel Maclean goes to Justice and Julia Lopez goes to DCMS).

Was it just me or was Liz Truss actually smirking during her statement outside Downing Street, the one littered with cliches about spades in the ground and wince-making turns of phrase like ‘aspiration nation’? Another two years of this PM talking about being ‘determined to deliver’ (deliver what, Liz?) is going to be really hard going.  Just listen to her. Look at her. Is this really the best that we can get from a country of 67 million people? Liz Truss?