Liz Truss' premiership is looking increasingly in peril after five weeks of navigating the country through an economic storm. On Friday, she sacked her top finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, and shelved her ambitious plan to reduce corporation tax. Meanwhile, the new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is said to be undoing Truss' other flagship policies.
"The premiership of Liz Truss is in grave danger," said Alistair Jones, associate professor of politics at De Montfort University in the UK. "The track record in the five weeks she's been in office has been absolutely abysmal where the UK economy has done very, very badly. Global confidence in the government and the way it's planning on running things has been massively undermined. The knock-on effect of this has been for Liz Truss to sack her chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, even though he was implementing the policies that she wanted to be implemented."
Jones explained that the entire campaign that Truss ran to become Conservative Party leader "was based around cutting taxes and also targeting some aspects of reduced spending, but basically trying to get the economy to grow." She vehemently criticized those who threw the viability of her plan into question as part of "anti-growth coalition," the academic noted, adding that eventually "this backfired massively, because so many international organizations questioned what she was doing."
However, markets reacted negatively to the Truss Cabinet's mini-budget, announced by then-Chancellor Kwarteng late last month. Borrowing and mortgage costs went up, while the pound sterling went down. Notably, the UK prime minister's decision to fire her chancellor and make a U-turn on her flagship tax-cutting policy on October 14 did not end the market turmoil: the British pound and government bonds fell again.
"Never before has Britain found itself in such a humiliatingly risible position," The Atlantic remarked on Friday. "It is the stuff of nightmares: the national equivalent of getting caught short onstage in front of your entire school because you chose not to go to the bathroom when you had the chance.
"The knock-on effect of this, though, has been for the Conservative Party to lose even more confidence in Liz Truss as prime minister," noted Jones. "Now it must be borne in mind that when the leadership election started, which she eventually won, about 50 MPs out of the 350 odd Conservative MPs actually backed. So you're talking therefore one in seven. In this respect, she did not have the support of Conservative MPs. Even though she won the election and many of them rallied round behind her - the reality is their support at best was lukewarm."
According to the professor, Truss "has done huge amounts of damage to the economy and to her party and to the credibility of the country in a very short space of time." He presumed that the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as the new chancellor looks like "a lack of confidence in Liz Truss."
Indeed, the British press of all stripes describes Hunt as the only adult in the room. The Guardian noted that the former health secretary is seen as "the most powerful man in government." The Spectator agreed: "Truss is now prime minister in name only: Jeremy Hunt, her chancellor of the exchequer, now holds power." According to the media, Hunt has repudiated the prime minister's mini-budget and is now working on a medium-term financial strategy at the Treasury, while operating in tandem with Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England. A newly-empowered Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) approves of Hunt's approach. "Each of these institutions – the Bank, the Treasury and the OBR – were treated with disdain by Truss and Kwarteng," The Spectator added.
"There is speculation that Liz Truss will be gone potentially in a matter of days if not weeks. And the reason being the lack of confidence in her ability to lead the party," Jones noted. "Her Cabinet was made up of allies rather than trying to unify the party, and they were basically simply isolated from the rest of the party. Her speeches, and even with the sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng, that particular press conference, instilled little or no confidence in her ability to lead."
"One of them, possibly Mordaunt, [would] be prime minister," the academic continued. "And if she was to be prime minister, Rishi Sunak would be head chancellor of the exchequer and Jeremy Hunt could choose whatever job he wanted. Apart from those two, if Sunak was to become prime minister, Jeremy Hunt, as speculated, will stay in post as chancellor and Penny Mordaunt will become deputy prime minister and also foreign secretary."
As of yet, this is all speculation, because there is a whole argument about whether or not the Conservative Party wants to go through the turmoil of another leadership election, according to the professor.
There are many various potential successors being considered in the press: from Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace to former Chancellor Rishi Sunak. What saves Truss at the moment is that "there is no common consensus on who would be best placed to take over," according to The Spectator. Nonetheless, the British media doesn't rule out that the patience of British MPs will soon become extremely thin resulting in Truss' ouster.
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