So, the results are in. Finally, courtesy of the ‘selectorate’ of Tory party members, we have a new prime minister.
We have a head of state called Elizabeth and a new occupant of Number Ten Downing Street, also called Elizabeth.
How will our frail monarch react when greeted by a naïve young prime minister so fond of hugging that she almost knocked the wind out of every convert to her cause? I guess the answer is not to show much enthusiasm, Ma’am, which shouldn’t be too difficult.
But how will the Queen start to comprehend a fickle young thing who has gone from Liberal Democrat to extreme right-wing Tory, from Remainer to ardent Brexiteer, from rabid republican to… rabid monarchist?
And how will the ageing matriarch be able to handle a woman who models herself on a previous female prime minister – one, incidentally, the Queen couldn’t abide – without bearing the faintest resemblance to her?
How will she adapt to a geographical dunce so lacking in experience of the world she mistook the Black Sea for the Baltic and, from sheer excess of vivacity, called the president of France her foe? No wonder Boris Johnson made her Foreign Secretary.
In short, how will the Queen solve the riddle of this sphinx? Will she, like the rest of the country, be wondering to what conceivable question, pondered over for so many torrid weeks, Liz Truss could be the answer? Clue: at the time of the financial crisis in 2008, the Queen asked economists at the LSE why they hadn’t seen it coming. How will she handle this ingenue who is so keen on maths, but completely at sea when it comes to economics?
Now it’s not my business here to teach a great grandmother how to suck eggs. The Queen’s consummate professionalism is sure to prevail. But some of us have to write about this enigma and, believe me, this is no easy thing to do. The material is so scant, the woman in question so spectral. Ideally, I could have drawn on two traditions in journalism, those of the kompromat and the obituary. The first is the dirt kept securely under lock and key by any self-respecting editor. Never having been an editor, I have always imagined a little safe in their office which contains the dirt on various important people, but there’s no way such a strong box could actually be little. We should probably imagine it as a kind of walk-in fridge of the size and capacity that would accommodate a fleeing Boris Johnson. Better still, imagine it as Augean stables so large that Hercules himself could never cleanse them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s stables, for example, the ones he claimed expenses for heating. But I digress.
The dirt on Rishi Sunak has been dished long since. The dirt on Liz Truss includes her spell at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when she allowed farmers to dump pollutants, including pesticides and animal faeces, in the country’s rivers. Now that is dirt. However, these are already in the public realm. God knows what filth is yet to be revealed – I, regrettably, don’t.
The other journalistic tradition I could have followed involves preparing obituaries for prominent people before they die. It must be a sobering thought for those people, that eloquent assessments of their time on Earth already exist, locked in a second capacious safe in the room next to the one full of dirt. The obit safe is the antithesis of the other one, it’s where the nice stuff is kept.
Because I am writing before the end of the seemingly interminable Conservative leadership contest, I feel like I’m anticipating somewhat, though every rune and tea leaf I’ve so far managed to read predicts a Truss victory. It wouldn’t just be a gamble to write Sunak’s obit a whole week before his political career bit the dust. It would be a waste of time, as literally no one, not even his mum, would be interested after it had. Instead, I’m really attempting to write the reverse of an obituary, in breathless anticipation of a prime ministerial career as yet in its infancy. In other words, I have to say something intelligent about the future of the very infant you, dear readers, will just have heard squealing from a lectern in Downing Street. It will take no small amount of nerve to attempt this advanced level of prognostication.
Liz Truss arrives just in time for autumn, but what a summer it’s been. Temperatures have hit record highs here, in what William Blake – complacently as it turns out – once called a ‘green and pleasant land’. Any greenness has given way to apocalyptic shades of brown and fiery red. As for pleasantness, the decision of the Conservatives to elect a new leader took care of that. The British people were unanimous in the view that the bickering of the final two candidates provided an amusing distraction from the scorching heat. Similarly, at the Proms, the emperor Nero had us all on our feet when he confounded his critics with a masterful violin recital.
Actually, the heat made such behaviour unthinkable. The Albert Hall was forced to ban standing ovations for health reasons. The air was so hot, we were told it exceeded the heat in our own lungs. Not for the first time – in fact, it feels like the story of the decade so far – we were obliged to sit in our lounges and watch the telly. There was no escape from current affairs. Of course, compared with those who lost their homes in the fires, I was blessed, my house remained intact. Compared to those who had to sleep in wet sheets with ice in their hot water bottles, I was lucky, a massive fan just about sufficed. The worst upset for me was finding an entire batch of suppositories had melted. For the benefit of younger readers who are yet to experience the rarefied pleasure of suppositories, let me explain, they are made of animal fat and designed to melt in the human body. Even when stored in a bathroom cupboard, they are quite unable to withstand temperatures they would normally encounter in the rectum, and those were the ambient conditions. Not to put too fine a point on it, to all intents and purposes, regardless of our class or income status, young and old alike, we became suppositories.
Times of crisis, like the imminent prospect of the hangman’s rope, have a way of focusing the mind. When Keynes, the famous economist, remarked that ‘in the long run, we are all dead’ it is possible he was being over-optimistic – who now has faith in ‘the long run’, when energy prices are set to ruin middle income households and a newsreader mistakenly refers to the Office of National Sadistics? – while Benjamin Franklin famously said ‘Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.’ Right.
Unless, it seems, you are a contender for the leadership of the Conservative and Unionist (stop snickering at the back) Party. Then the taxes bit will somehow be taboo, and as for death, it shall definitely have no dominion. The whole summer seems to have been taken up with a very protracted séance to summon the Iron Lady. Sadly, Liz Truss is the feeble wisp of ectoplasm they have to show for it.
Mind you, credit where it’s due, the last medium to pull off the ectoplasmic pussy bow was Mary M in 1929:
Truss, a spiritualist of the highest calibre, has taken the trouble to channel an economist from the glory days of Thatcherism. Admittedly not the dearly departed Friedrich Hayek, nor the late lamented Milton Friedman, nor even the tragically deceased (and splendidly named) Joseph Schumpeter, but a man called Patrick Minford who is actually still breathing, and who she claims as an authority for the idea that cutting taxes is the only way to deal with inflation. Never mind that superannuated survivors of the days of Thatcher’s reign have told her that their boss would never have cut taxes before getting the nation’s accounts in order. Liz has persevered in her mission to embody the Iron Lady in all her monetarist glory.
This dabbling in the afterlife can come at a price, and at times the stressful demands of the occult have appeared to disorient Truss. Unlike her idol, she has done a lot of turning. Over the course of the summer, her best turn of all came after she suggested that public sector workers outside London should be paid less than their counterparts in the capital. When the turn came, after a clamour from Tory MPs representing the provinces, she accused the media of misrepresenting her. But is it any wonder Lizzy is so dizzy? In general, she has been unable to decide from one moment to the next whether she's addressing the Tory membership or the wider voting public. The song actually went ‘You make me dizzy Miss Lizzy!’ These U-turns are enough to confuse both her audiences. It won't be long before we all find it difficult to exit a room the way we came in. This could also be a turning point for the way this country is run. The Tory party has had it all its own way for twelve years, living off the rest of us. Much longer and the parasite could die with the host.
Both candidates had to behave as if no one outside the party could overhear what they were telling the members. In Sunak’s case, he was caught on camera telling the party faithful in Tunbridge Wells what they wanted to hear about funding, how he had striven to redirect money to them from ‘deprived’ areas. Now, at last, we could understand why people are ‘disgusted in Tunbridge Wells.’* It was high time they got what they so richly deserved: not merely hustings to deliver properly costed policies, but disgusted hustings to keep them fuming and to disgust the rest of us. In short, ‘disgustings’. Both candidates had to demonstrate that they could deliver a seemingly endless supply of these disgustings. As Andrew Rawnsley put it,
‘The fight for Number Ten has been most notable for the bitter poison of their exchanges. Rishi Sunak and his people have attacked Liz Truss as a deranged fantasist peddling an immoral agenda that will throw millions into destitution and be an electoral “suicide note”. She and her outriders have called him “a stoat”, “a disgrace” who is “not fit for office” and “a socialist”, which is the Tory party’s c-word’ (Observer, 28 August).
I confess I missed the stoat. Perhaps it was a harmless attempt to add a little variety, having exhausted people’s patience with references to reverse ferrets, weasels, rats in sacks, etcetera.
In truth, both candidates behaved more like sphinxes than stoats. They both liked to believe they were having a private conversation with the Tory membership – a sort of Tunbridge Wells garden of the mind – and were miffed when the media overheard what they were saying. The only honest answer when journalists brought these utterances up would have been “Ah yes, but that wasn’t meant for your ears, kindly mind your own business.” I suggest that next time the entire Conservative 'family' be provided with a private space where they can be as callous as they like and there's no one to eavesdrop. There must be a network of caves somewhere suitable for the purpose. The ones left vacant in Afghanistan would serve.
Given the procedural constraints, the next best option was a string of semi-private séances so tedious that the general public would nod off or switch off. One TV host actually fainted, possibly from the boredom. Another advantage was that there, in the dark, while the medium was droning on, the various candidates could play footsie under the table.
In his novel Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald describes the ectoplasm that ‘clairvoyants can produce from their mouths in great bubbles which then fall to the ground, where they soon dry and fall to dust.’ One wonders if, after all this effort through the duration of the silly season, the ectoplasm that is Liz Truss is destined to fall and disintegrate in like fashion. She is an insubstantial thing, possibly only the second prime minister to be a ghost. Boris Johnson was the first one, either the ghost of Churchill or of Walpole, depending on how much slack you’re prepared to cut him. It’s possible that, having got there first, the previous ghost will not be exorcised so easily. At the very least, he is survived by his taste in wallpaper. But there could be worse to come. What if the party membership, having got the séance bug and summoned Margaret Thatcher from the other side, were to try for the shade of charisma itself? Spookily, David Gauke, ex-Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, has written an article in the New Statesman predicting exactly that, under the title ‘How Boris Johnson comes back’. He begins with the situation at the end of Theresa May’s brief tenure:
‘The problems for the country and the party appeared insurmountable; pessimism prevailed. In desperation, Conservatives MPs concluded that there was only one person who could turn around their electoral prospects. Yes, he was a divisive figure of dubious integrity and ministerial competence (he had not impressed when last in office) but he was a vote winner, capable of reaching parts of the electorate that no other Conservative could reach. And so Conservative MPs and members (often against their better judgement) chose Boris Johnson as leader of the party and prime minister in July 2019. The electoral gamble paid off, too. By the following December he had a majority of 80.’
Gauke then follows up with this paragraph, as if from the viewpoint of late in 2023:
‘The problems for the country and the party appear insurmountable; pessimism prevails. In desperation, Conservative MPs conclude that there is only one person who could turn around their electoral prospects. Yes, he is a divisive figure and some doubt his integrity and ministerial competence (he did not impress when last in office) but he is a vote winner, capable of reaching parts of the electorate that no other Conservative could reach (remember that 80 seat majority). And so, the prime minister is removed and Conservative MPs and members (often against their better judgement) choose Boris Johnson to replace them.’
You see what he did there? Trust a former Tory, even a relatively decent one like Gauke, to have fobbed an editor off with two almost identical paragraphs in one article. In the old days, he might have been straight down the Carlton Club, bragging about how he got paid good money to do this by a left-wing magazine: “That pretty much trumps however many times Penny Mordaunt managed to say the word ‘c---’ in the House of Commons!” Not anymore, though. Since he had the whip withdrawn over his Remainer views, he’s a reformed character.
What if Gauke’s prediction was not written entirely in jest? Soon after that, a mere long-time-in-politics ago, Rory Stewart was telling us Johnson wanted to ‘do a Berlusconi’:
‘A former adviser to Johnson in No 10 said he may seek to emulate Churchill, who had two separate spells as prime minister. “He agrees with most Tories that Liz is very likely to be a disaster,” the source said, speculating Truss could face a leadership challenge herself before the next election. “A refreshed and maybe more remorseful Boris providing optimism after much darkness might appeal to parliamentarians and members alike”’ (Guardian, 29 August).
Ah yes, of course, the sainted Churchill. But wait a minute – wasn’t Truss Johnson’s choice for successor? I know, it’s jolly confusing, so here’s a little Gedankenexperiment for you: what if there is a tiny grain of truth in what the ex-Secretary of State for Justice and former Lord Chancellor says? It would mean that Liz is part of a plan, the patsy in a bigger and more momentous wheeze that would see her fail, dismally, to solve the country’s myriad problems and get toppled, in a state of disgrace even worse than Johnson’s, by which time no one will remember the name Pincher – they barely remember it now – and they will certainly struggle to recall the proroguing of parliament, or the lack of ethics, or even ‘Partygate’.
A further speculation for you, though maybe there was something in those tealeaves: the patsy was in on the plot from the start. Because for some unaccountable reason, Truss has announced she has no intention of jogging our memories by continuing the inquiry of the privileges committee into whether Johnson misled parliament. She doesn’t even want an inquiry into the parties.
Further evidence is Johnson’s recent behaviour. Even by his own punishing standards, his nibs has been remarkably idle since he gave his resignation speech, the one where he never even used the word ‘resign’. I really have to check the transcript again one of these days. It was such a sleight of hand, I barely noticed the word’s absence the first time round. Since then, he has flown in a jet, belatedly celebrated his wedding, dad-danced, been on holiday more than once, had half his belongings moved out of Number Ten, and in all this time he has kept mum on the issues facing the country.
Complete silence, however, would have been laughably out of character – he was more likely to find God and join the Trappists – so lately he has resumed normal boosterism, assuring us that something will ‘plainly’ have to be done about the imminent energy bill crisis, even opining that the better off will have to pay. This may be Johnson’s inner Churchill speaking. As pointed out by Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation, even Churchill was happy to tax the rich when there was a war on. In fact, in his days as a Liberal, Churchill brought in an early version of the welfare state. When the Lords didn’t like the so-called People’s Budget, he threatened to abolish them.
It would be fanciful to suggest that, just because Johnson professes to admire Churchill, he bore any resemblance to the legendary war leader – apart, perhaps, from the stoop, which puts one in mind of the old boy picking his way across a bombsite, unruffled and cheerfully defiant.
With Johnson’s trips to Kyiv, it was a case of nice stoop, but no cigar. However, as Gauke and Stewart note, the old national treasure was also happy to Keep Buggering On. In 1951, he came back from the political dead, bringing his pet budgie, Toby, with him:
‘Toby was taught to drink and once had to be fished out of a brandy glass. He often perched on visitors’ heads, sometimes leaving a token of esteem— “hoping to be remembered,” according to Churchill. The bird often nibbled at books and manuscripts, Piers Brendon wrote, “thus indicating, in his master’s view, that he had read them. A secretary who showed Churchill a set of nibbled page proofs was told: ‘Oh! Yes, that’s all right, give him the next chapter’ (Churchill’s Bestiary, 54).
Johnson also has a pet, and I don’t mean Dilyn. One presumes he chose Liz Truss as his favourite because he so detested Sunak, the one who wielded the knife. But I suspect, since there are no pets in politics, he also chose her as a) a way of getting his own back on the treacherous parliamentary party who preferred Sunak, and b) making sure his successor was so weak, abrasive and simple-mindedly right-wing that she would inevitably make a mess of things; such a complete and utter mess of things, that the Tories will see him as their only electoral salvation. It was Sunak who warned the party members she would make them unelectable with her tax cuts and refusal to give people ‘handouts’ when the energy bills and cost of living crisis took their toll. Truss inadvertently confirmed this when, instead of repeating how she would hit the ground running on arrival in Number Ten, she boasted in a tweet that she would hit the ground. The jitters in the Conservative Party extend even to her supporters. Everyone is kept on tenterhooks as the sphinx refuses to say how, or even if, she will save the nation from certain ruin. Matthew Parris, an erstwhile Tory, was scathing in the Times, calling her ‘a planet-sized mass of over-confidence and ambition teetering upon a pinhead of a political brain’ and warning people in his old party not to harbour any comforting illusions about her:
‘…we shall revert to our first impressions. Save yourself the detour and stick with them. She’s crackers. It isn’t going to work.’
That word was borrowed from the verdict of Dominic Cummings, who saw her in action at close quarters and concluded she was as near to ‘properly crackers as anyone in parliament’.
So, maybe it was no accident that, at the end of his political life, Johnson’s dying words were “Hasta la vista, baby!” Strictly speaking, this affectionate valediction was addressed to the Speaker, as are all utterances in the house. But leaving parliamentary conventions aside, as was his wont, perhaps the old rake was mentally adding Liz Truss to his long list of offspring.
If so, I wouldn’t fancy her chances when she does make a mess of things. This be the verse: like so many parents before him, Boris could turn out to be the kind of parent Philip Larkin warned us about. And worse still, he will have meant it.
* Letters to the editor traditionally began with ‘Sir’ and were signed ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.’ According to Wikipedia, this is a generic name used in the United Kingdom for a person with strongly conservative political views who writes letters to newspapers or to the BBC in moral outrage. Disgusted is the pseudonym of the supposed letter writer, who is a resident of the stereotypically middle-class town of Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in southeast England.
