There’s a moment in politics when you have no moves left. No matter how clever you are, or how right your case is, the walls are closing in and they won’t stop until you are crushed. There is no experience like being in a Prime Minister’s office when that moment comes. It is crushing precisely because it feels as unfair as it is inevitable.
That moment is upon No 10 now — with a brutal twist. Normally it is possible to blame external circumstances, often a political rival ruthlessly splitting the party to seize the crown, reckless of the damage caused.
This time it is entirely a situation of the Prime Minister’s making. It is her policies, the ones she set out in her leadership campaign, which have been fully implemented and more. It is her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, who spooked the markets by sacking his Permanent Secretary, the most senior civil servant in the Treasury; preventing the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, a Tory creation, from publishing forecasts of the Government’s “mini-budget”; and wanting to abolish the top rate of income tax, on top of ending the cap on bankers’ bonuses. Three strikes and Kwarteng was out.
Is there a way through? Very possibly. Truss is facing the ultimate gang who couldn’t shoot straight. The parliamentary Conservative party is often called the most sophisticated electorate in the world — a phrase which is only true if you construe “sophisticated” according to the Elizabethan meaning of the word. These are the MPs who chose Theresa May, who lost a 20-point lead and a majority in an election against Jeremy Corbyn. They then plumped for Boris Johnson who governed as he has lived — as a Lord of Misrule. He became the only prime minister to have been found guilty of breaking the law — rules for which he had legislated, but in character had clearly failed to read.
This most “sophisticated” electorate has surpassed itself with a free market leader who has now been judged freely by those very markets. As a great Strathclyde Regional Council leader once said to me, speaking of his hundred strong Labour group of councillors: “Ah wouldnae let them walk my dog round the block. And I don’t have a dog.”
If, now, the appointment of Jeremy Hunt, a former Cabinet minister with no Treasury experience who fell out of the Tory leadership in the first round, is being hailed as a stroke of Machiavellian genius, perhaps it is possible to discern a faint and very narrow path to victory for the Prime Minister — or at least to survival, which feels like the same thing.
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