By Matthew Flinders*
As Liz Truss stepped away from the lectern outside No.10 Downing Street after resigning as leader of her party, it probably occurred to her that her time as prime minister will have been only as long as the leadership campaign that got her there.
When Boris Johnson walked away from No.10 there was a sense in the United Kingdom that the time had come for stability, competence and the benefits of a boring politician who could steady the ship of state. Truss’s sea legs have proved remarkably shaky. She has pulled off arguably the biggest coup in British political history by making Johnson’s tenure look boring by comparison.
Truss began as prime minister in September, proposing a radical agenda that she claimed was designed to kick start economic growth. But she had to row back on those plans almost immediately after the polar opposite happened. Her proposals triggered an immediate economic meltdown from which she never recovered.
The shortness of her tenure does at least make it relatively easy to sum up where it all went wrong. I suggest there were five key elements at play in her rise and fall.
Poor politics
Truss practised poor politics from the very beginning of her tenure. She refused to appoint anyone into government that had not supported her campaign, leaving her with a limited pool of talent. Her stance that you were either a friend or an enemy (and enemies were out) gave her a reputation for revenge. Not a good start. There was an obvious lack of talent in her cabinet and after less than two months in office, Truss had to fire her chancellor and home secretary – the two most senior positions in government below the PM.
Poor party process
But the cracks were emerging even before Truss took office as a direct result of the way the Conservative party elects its leaders. Truss ended up in the final round of the contest as much by default as anything else and did not enjoy the enthusiastic support of her parliamentary party. In order to win the leadership election, she sold herself to the rank and file of party members by offering them tax policies that were tailored entirely to their needs rather than reflecting the needs or priorities of the wider country.
She adopted an awkward Thatcherite persona in presentational terms and a “red meat” strategy in policy terms. The overall effect was a new prime minister who was badly misaligned with both the public and her parliamentary party.
Poor policy
The level of misalignment was clear from the minute Truss’s self-mutilating mini-budget was announced. Removing barriers on bankers bonuses and reducing business taxes was never going to land well in the middle of a cost of living crisis. The optics were all wrong, as any first-year politics student would know.
Poor presentation
Politics is, at the end of the day, a people business. You need to be able to communicate, resonate, connect and empathise. The most important form of intelligence for a prime minister is not therefore intellectual (we have experts) or financial (they have advisers) but emotional. The simple fact is that Truss never seemed to be able to relate or relax. The interview responses were always too mechanical, the body language too cardboard.
Poor positioning
If the troubles of Truss reveal one thing it is most probably the dangers of the British constitution. It remains a power-hoarding constitution where an incredibly small number of people can make massive decisions with very little, if any, scrutiny. Her sidelining of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility being a case in point.
“Poor, poor, poor” might well provide a fitting epitaph for Truss’s time in office but I cannot help but wonder if her experience is symptomatic of a far bigger issue. Is it too easy to blame Truss? If anything the last month has exposed a vacuum at the centre of British politics about ambition, imagination and vision. There really isn’t any.
In a post-Brexit context, filling this vacuum has to be the core concern of whomever next decides to accept the keys to No.10.
*Matthew Flinders, Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
35 Comments
Yes it is. It is symptomatic of politicians and political parties who are absolutely so insanely out of touch with the people they propose to serve that it is hard to believe. They are so obsessed with their own personal agendas, and so blind to what is happening around them that it makes a mockery of the entire democratic process.
Democracy is slowly being dismantled which is allowing this to happen and it is happening everywhere, not just the UK.
A lesson for Chris Luxon & the Gnats : do not give generous tax cuts to high income earners .... leave the top rate where it is ....
.... if you shift the lower tax bands , everyone benefits from that , all taxpayers will thank you ...
" Read the room " , guys ...
Socialism is free education, free health care and universal pension. So NZ, UK most if not all EU countries are socialist - taxes are wealth redistribution. How does China compare? Judging by Chinese TV dramas most plots consist of contract marriages where one party has been blackmailed because they need funds for their ill grandparent treatment.
If by socialism you mean western countries will renationalise phones and steel production then I doubt it.
I am an avid UK watcher & have been for more than 40 years, since I left the place in 1980. I'm not a Brit, I'm a New Zealander but my roots are British. Good Kentish farm labouring stock in fact. However, this latest chapter of British politics is as you say in the article, a poor result all round. Sadly.
And you are right to say that it is happening all around us, even here, where all sides of the argument seem incapable of doing anything positive for our futures. The reality is that after 50 years of sub-par education, most of us just don't understand our own history enough to know where we are are & why we are, which is seriously undermining the current result.
That was in fact, the aim of the education system in the first place, all those years ago, and it has morphed into this hate-filled arena where all sides are now shouting at one another leading to relationship breakdown right across the spectrum of our society & culture. Backed up by poor law encouraging single parent families is another part of the demise, along with the ugly truth behind long term welfare, which has trapped huge numbers of people at the bottom of our society. History will not be kind to us in hindsight, me thinks.
The solution, however, is hard. Hard to see, hard to accept, hard to do & way too hard for most people who are addicted to welfare in its various insidious guises. And very hard to admit to if your the 6th Labour Govt of NZ. It is a rather melancholic situation right across the board. We do not possess the people or the processes capable of turning this around. It is humbling us, whether we like it or not. There are too many false teachers with too many false narratives, creating absolute mayhem amongst the many, which is exactly what an early stage communism revolution is all about. Chaos. Note: Zimbabwe.
They keep telling us that the big baddies are coming & are quick to make sure we buy into the pitch of fear they peddle day in & day out through our medias, when actually, it is the communists (universities, media & statists) within our own system that are destroying us from the inside, that are the ones we should be wary of.
It took us 1,000 years to create the most wonderful culture available to most of the people, which even today, is a minority choice (most people don't have) of lifestyle of what's available on planet Earth today. Unfortunately, today, even most New Zealanders still do not fully appreciate this.
The New Zealand taxpayers have (begrudgingly) underwritten our own poverty for more than half a century & then failed to house the same people they nurtured into being by not building enough state homes for most of that time, whilst blaming the greedy landlords for ''the housing crisis'' when successive govts have failed to deliver anything worthy of good leadership for the majority of my lifetime.
The article is right. It is poor.
Rant over.
LJ
... great rant ... and you're not wrong , John ... over generations we in the west gave gotten soft , gone flabby .. ... indulged ourselves in welfare , debt , unaccountability , mediocrity ... everyone's a winner/everyone gets medal ... even if they are as dumb as a sack full of Khadashians ... and who're our new heroes ? ... scientists , medical researchers , humanitarians? ... No ! ... Khadashians , members of F'boy Island , Kanye West ....
... OMG .. we have dropped the ball ...
Rightly or wrongly Liz tried to do something different like increasing average Joe net income probably on the basis they would spend it more productively than Govt. Now a return to insanity - doing the same thing and expecting a different result - insanity - Einstein. A[art from spelling Jeremy *unts name wrong he was a failure as health secretary and a remainer and WEF acolyte, the tory saboteurs will piss off the members by gerrymandering the rules to appoint a PM of their preference and will be surprised when the financial and voting support evaporates.A Labour Govt will be a death knell fro the UK.
Just a note.... Einstein never said that apparently.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/
Personally, I think it should be "stupidity" instead of insanity.
No she was just stupid to try and challenge the lenders funding UK, lesson here for both Labour and National.... many here seem to say that National will give tax relief and borrow... Labour is printing and spending! seems to me that Labour is already doing what some say National will do
Robbo has 39 % of the nation's GDP coming into the government's coffers annually ... and he's spending 42 % of total GDP .... debt is blowing out ...
.. in a nutshell : the government is dominating & crowding out private enterprise .... and they're racking up the mother-of-all debts for a future generation to repay ...
We're bureaucratically top heavy ... and ever deeper in debt ...
How many times do political parties let party members choose the leader of the party before they bin the idea?
In the UK it was Labour with Jeremy Corbyn, who went on to lose two General Elections.
In NZ it was Labour opting for several no hopers by the same process. It was only Andrew Little falling on his sword that let Labour seize on a procedural loophole to elect Ardern without involving the members.
In the UK, the members elected Truss rather than the MPs choice Sunak. Right now the Tory Party could stuff it up again, If the members chose someone contrary to the MPs choice in a run off between the two leading candidates.
It's all a bit like a big corporate asking their customers to choose who should be the CEO of the company.
What do they say about the definition of insanity?
It shows politicians in particular that you can't afford to be on the wrong side of a dogged journalistic pursuit in this "believe whatever you read" media age we live in. If policy errors were a universal reason for dismissal then Adrian Orr should have been gone two years ago.
I cant believe they are going to annoint the guy directly responsible for the UK being in the dire economic situation it is. Its like handing Grant Robertson the PM position and saying "here's your reward for destroying the economy and creating rampant inflation that is forcing New Zealanders into homelessness and starvation". Good one.
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