The spectacle of the political implosion of the Conservative Party is no reason for schadenfreude among Irish and European democrats. That said, Liz Truss’s premiership has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for Britain. She cannot be forgiven or excused for what has happened.
Truss and her allies ruthlessly used every available weapon to defeat Rishi Sunak, the favourite of the parliamentary party, in the contest to replace Boris Johnson. They portrayed Sunak as a Labour chancellor in all but name. They rubbished his concerns for the integrity of the UK’s public finances. They sold a message of unfunded borrowing leading to dramatic growth with the zeal of true believers. They were contemptuous of those who preached caution. Their strategy was one of reckless self-belief, rather than a mild case of wishful thinking.
And yet Sunak did surprisingly well – polling 60,000 votes to Truss’s 81,000 – to defy the pollsters’ predictions of a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Tory Party membership. Faced with Sunak’s better than predicted performance, Truss ruthlessly purged his supporters from her Cabinet, as if she held them all in contempt as benighted cowards whose political mettle disqualified them from the ranks of true believers.
The ludicrous aspect of the ERG’s mentality is their failure to grasp the colossal damage done by them and by Truss to Britain’s standing in the eyes of the world
We are in no great position to judge whether there was any substance to the Truss team’s damaging campaign press briefings which portrayed Penny Mordaunt – eliminated in the 5th round of voting by MPs – as a gormless lightweight. But having seen Truss blithely destroy her erstwhile closest ally, Kwazi Kwarteng, and show herself to be an inarticulate mouther of poorly-scripted mantras at her pathetic press conference last Friday, one can only think that, at best, she proved that “it takes one to know one” if those criticisms were at all true.
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And to think that Truss bemoaned her own comprehensive school for “overlooking her potential”!
This debacle has, like Brexit, been engineered by the Tory Commons rump faction known as the European Research Group (the ERG). They live in a fantasy world where trade agreements with the Commonwealth and domestic enterprise zones, coupled with welfare reductions, spending cuts and a buccaneering spirit, will see Britain escape its long-term post-industrial malaise.
The new austerity now enthusiastically espoused by new chancellor Jeremy Hunt (who, in the leadership contest, outbid Truss’s 19 per cent corporation tax promise with his own 15 per cent variant) ends all talk of raising defence expenditure to 3 per cent of GDP and much of Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda.
[ Dismayed Tory MPs continue plot to oust Liz TrussOpens in new window ]
The ludicrous aspect of the ERG’s mentality is their failure to grasp the colossal damage done by them and by Truss to Britain’s standing in the eyes of the world. The result is pitiful. They endorsed the “unfunded borrowing to drive growth” strategy. It blew up. And now their concern is to save their own parliamentary seats from the consequences of their own political deafness and blindness.
In Northern Ireland, there was hope that the Stormont administration could go to Whitehall with an outstretched begging bowl to politically massage the reconstitution of the powersharing executive. Spending cuts do not augur well for that aspiration. On the contrary, there is every sign of a looming budgetary crisis to compound the political crisis of DUP abstentionism.
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That is why schadenfreude is wholly inappropriate among political observers in Dublin. The UK needs to get back on an even keel politically and economically. If Sunak or some like-minded leader emerges to rescue the Tories from immediate meltdown, he or she could face down the ERG by threatening a general election if they will not support one-nation Toryism instead of the Johnson/Truss fantasy ideology.
The western world is facing a crisis of self-belief. Trumpism in America and Trussism in Britain threaten the viability of the two big pillars of western democracy and freedoms. We are weeks away from the likely loss of both Houses of Congress to Trump-dominated Republican politics.
[ The Irish Times view on Liz Truss: a dismal spectacleOpens in new window ]
This Western crisis is, in no small way, the disastrous legacy of Rupert Murdoch, a man whose pursuit of political influence is an ongoing toxic drip-feed in the arm of democracies wherever he has cast his media shadow. His Fox News and the Tory tabloids who recently noisily lauded Kwarteng’s so-called “mini” budget are part of a piece. They are reckless purveyors of divisive, deceptive political snake oil.
Come to think of it, who in the UK media actually supported Sunak’s conservative approach to the UK economy? Are sensible media dumbstruck by the fear of being proven wrong by opinion polls? One of the Tory right’s hit-list victims is the BBC, a last bastion of centrist reasonableness. Is public opinion to be informed by the BBC or led by the Sun, the Mail and the Express?
Britain has to learn lessons from this national and international debacle. Its centre has to be reconstructed and empowered. Having avoided the madness of Corbyn, Britain needs to shake off the delusions of its hard right.