Well that was fast. Hi and bye to Liz Truss. What new terror can we expect next?

I promised myself I would never start a blog with the cliche “so I haven’t blogged in a while”. It’s overused and everyone can look at the post frequency on your blog. However, when I sat down to write this blog, I did ask myself: what is “a while?” In blogging, a while is a few weeks. Turns out, at the breakneck pace of modern politics that’s enough time for a Prime Minister to come and go.

So, I must apologise. Partly for having my cake and eating it with that opening, but also for neglecting to write a post on Liz Truss as our new Prime Minister before her premiership is over. This post will have to serve as both her hi and bye, as let’s be frank, there isn’t enough to say about her to fill two posts.

The Truss debacle would be funny if it didn’t lay bare how fucked British politics is. Scratch that, it is funny as well as being terrifying; like a Jordan Peele film. Truss romped to power promising that everything will be sunshine and roses because she said it will be. If Labour ever tried anything so bold, they would be required to justify such a claim with the sort of peer reviewed evidence that no one understands 80 times before breakfast. If you’re a Tory, you can promise unicorns for everyone and no-one bats an eye lid.

Hiding under a desk

That is until the markets - the only god that the Tories still fear even if they no longer love or believe in anything moral or metaphysical - said no to huge unfunded tax cuts, and Truss was ruined faster than the interior decor of a London restaurant with a booking from a certain Oxford students’ club.

There is something deeply ironic about financial institutions, staffed largely by the people benefiting from the tax cuts Truss was trying to ram through, reacting so badly to her programme that Tower 42 nearly shot off into space. Is that where banks are based? I don’t know. I don’t go into the City, if I can avoid it.

The reaction was so severe that when Penny Mordaunt said Truss wasn’t hiding under a desk, everyone knew she probably was. Looks like we have found the point where bankers put the national interest above their own: it’s to bring down Liz Truss.

No one will miss her

Truss engaged in the fastest and most epic bout of bed shitting in British political history. I said a while back that this was terrifying. The terrifying part is that the Tories are still in power, and their MPs get to choose the person with the unenviable responsibility of sorting all this out. I’m sure that whoever the next Tory leader is, they’ll bear all our best interests in mind.

Still, you have to laugh. I have never seen anything fall apart as quickly as Truss’s premiership. Even with the relentless speed of modern politics, this has all been head-spinningly fast. I don’t think anyone will miss her. Most people didn’t even notice she was in Number 10.

The threat to Labour

Perhaps more significant than Truss’s departure is what goes with her, which is the vision of a low-tax, low-regulation, Brexit Britain. Brexit continues to cause economic chaos, but no workable way forward presents itself. Turning the UK (or London) into Singapore-on-Thames didn’t even get off the launch pad.

So, what’s next? Are the Tories going to give levelling up another go? Or will they start a huge culture war over immigration or cars to try and close the gap in the polls. Who knows, but whatever they try it will be dreadful for the 90% of us who are more worried about heating our homes and doing the weekly shop, than which bundle of class privilege shoved into a suit the Tories choose as the next PM.

The biggest threat to Labour, looking pretty content right now with their massive poll lead, is that the Tories dig up austerity as their key narrative. As I write this morning, we may be hours away from fiscal conservative Rishi Sunak becoming PM, which makes this look even more likely.

Re-running the 2015 election

The Tories may be unable to re-run the 2019 election, with Boris Johnson doing his usual routine and Keir Starmer cast in the role of Jeremy Corbyn, but they may be able to re-run the 2015 election with Sunak saying that there’s no money for all this nice Labour stuff and that he’s the man to make tough decisions about the nation’s finances, whilst Starmer performs an Ed Miliband tribute act of not challenging austerity but pointing out the Tories are mean and that the economy is weak.

It didn’t work in the considerably more stable 2015 and it won’t work against the unfolding economic disaster of the present.

I wonder if we will ever be nostalgic for Liz Truss, the way some terminally short minded people are about David Cameron and Theresa May? Or is this really the low point for British politics? We’ve had a PM so incompetent that they managed to fuck up giving banks tax cuts to the point where banks destroyed her. I guess this is the point to make a joke about chaos with Ed Miliband, but that’s one cliche I won’t touch.

“I've seen things... seen things you little people wouldn't believe”

I will leave you with his sobering thought: there’s a bit of cheese in my fridge that has seen three Prime Ministers and two monarchs. I’m not in the habit of asking dairy products for wisdom, but what this chunk of cheddar can teach us is that things can change quickly in politics. We’ve had three PMs whose terms have been shorter lived than Roy Batty.

My advice to Labour is that the polls look good now, but the Tories are about to do one of their reinventions they do whenever they are threatened. Be prepared for the political terrain to become considerably less favourable.

Photo of Liz Truss from Wikipedia and used under the United Kingdom Open Government Licence v3.0.