MY suspicion that a Liz Truss premiership might not be the longest-lived of political beasts began when I interviewed her for the JC in a Manchester commuter belt synagogue in August.
For her, this should have been the easiest of gigs. Discussing the interview in advance with her Jewish Tory Party election campaign spokesman, Jason Stein, I’d made clear I was looking for some strong, quotable remarks about fighting antisemitism, her relationship with the Jewish community, and her attitude to Israel – along with some more personal stuff about her own friendships with Jews.
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Liz Truss speaking to the JC's Politics Editor, David Rose (Photo by Jonathan Pow)
Yet she managed to mess it up, generating controversy where none needed to be, by praising "Jewish values" as Conservative ones – and then going on to define these as Jews’ commitment to the family and “starting businesses”, so straying, as some saw it, dangerously close to the stereotypical tropes favoured by anti-Semites.
But more than anything she did or didn’t say, what struck me most was her palpable exhaustion, and apparent inability to respond even to easy questions with anything approximating to spontaneity or warmth. To be sure, tramping the length and breadth of the country to repeat her hustings message day after day must have been tiring. But I couldn’t help thinking that compared to the gruelling, relentless toll exacted by the office of Prime Minister, with its constant requirement to make sound, well-informed judgments on what might well be matters of life and death, it was bound to be a doddle.
By the time we met, it looked certain she would win. And when she did, it seemed to me, we would probably witness some serious unforced errors that might have damaging results.
Wary as I was, I could never have imagined that her leadership of the country would implode so fast, or with such crushing totality. As I write on Wednesday evening, she is still in office – just. But as one seasoned former Cabinet minister told me this morning, “her chances of survival now are absolute zero. This simply can’t continue.”
She did, I suppose, get through Prime Minister’s questions. She didn’t choke like some wannabe improv hip-hop artist as she has several times previously in recent weeks: she did at least say something.
But what was it? A U-turn on a U-turn – a pledge to keep the triple lock on pensions that only 24 hours earlier was, we were told, about to be ripped up. Meanwhile, she was spaffing further uncosted spending commitments around on request when the country is meant to be facing deep cuts.
And then, humiliation of humiliations, she found herself saying she was “a fighter not a quitter” – so channelling Labour’s “Prince of Darkness”, Lord Peter Mandelson, who just happens to be playing a significant role in shaping Sir Keir Starmer’s ever-more focused and impressive Labour critique.
In the Commons, I thought Sir Keir judged the mood just right. He was fierce, but not bullying: Ms Truss was already so badly damaged before this session began that there was a danger that if he had gone in too hard, the audience in the country, if not in the Commons, might have been moved to pity her.
But to his barbs she had – could not have – any answer. She had “crashed the economy,” he said again and again, with her disastrous, now largely-scrapped mini-budget, and although the markets seemed for now to have stabilised, higher mortgage payments for millions has been the disastrous, avoidable result.
He listed the measures she had already scrapped, ending each phrase with the lethal one-word comment, “gone” – a word that became a deafening Labour chant, which he followed with his punchline: “They are already gone, so why is she still here?”
Yet Labour’s contempt was not the critical factor. More significant was the response from the Tories, who mostly stayed silent, with folded arms, their faces wearing expressions of horror and disbelief. No one, it seemed, was now prepared to be seen to be rallying around.
If the public drama in the chamber was bad, events behind the scenes were even worse. Before the session started Jason Stein, my cheerful interlocutor before the interview in the Manchester shul, had been suspended from his post as a special adviser – apparently for briefing the Sunday Times that the PM thought former chancellor Sajid Javid was “s***”.
By teatime, Suella Braverman – having days earlier been spoken of as a possible successor to Ms Truss – had been forced to resign as Home Secretary, apparently for making an unforced error of her own.
Coming up later in the evening was a vote on a Labour motion to ban all future fracking, which inexplicably the Tory whips had told their MPs was to be treated as a confidence motion in Liz Truss. This meant they had either to risk bringing her down or to vote against a motion some evidently supported, either out of conviction or because they believed that to vote against would risk their constituents’ wrath.
In the tumult of the Commons, I couldn’t quite catch the sound of her premiership’s death rattle. But surely, it seemed, there won’t be long to wait.
Towards the end of the day, I spoke to my former Cabinet minister friend again. “She could go tomorrow, or at any time very soon,” he said. “There’ll be an accelerated leadership campaign, and a new PM by the end of next month.
