
UK: Curtains for Truss
Names of candidates to replace Truss are already floating about. These include former rival Rishi Sunak, House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt, and even former PM Boris Johnson.

Names of candidates to replace Truss are already floating about. These include former rival Rishi Sunak, House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt, and even former PM Boris Johnson.

Facing inevitable electoral oblivion, in an odd way, affords the political Right a rare opportunity. With absolutely no chance of keeping Labour out of Number 10 (nor any possibility that they could prove worse), the nation finally has the opportunity to bury the Tories once and for all, and unite behind a genuine conservative coalition.
Many in Truss’ own party are disenchanted with her already, upset by her swift U-turn in replacing Kwarteng with Hunt, and are considering ways of ousting her as quickly as possible.

Jeremy Hunt’s proposed tax scheme could easily have been hatched by a Labour government.

In response to questions, an automaton-like Truss kept on reiterating her desire for high growth. Her party, let alone the nation, is unlikely to take heart from its Prime Minister’s latest performance.

Truss seems happy to keep disappointing the right flank of her party. Truss’s approach to immigration may also tank her popularity with voters who expected a government willing to sacrifice the absolute value of GDP for a stronger, more socially cohesive nation.

The pound dropped to as low as $1.0327 on Monday, an 8% fall that started on Friday, September 23, following new Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng’s unveiling of historic tax cuts.

Despite spending much of the leadership campaign denouncing Sunak’s “handout” schemes and proposing generous tax cuts instead, now in government Truss seems to have U-turned.

Truss faces multiple political challenges from the outset, not least of which is to unite a Conservative party still scarred by the toppling of its most successful leader in decades, not to mention the less-than-amicable leadership contest which followed.

The Tory leadership race is a fight between Sunak’s ‘Thatcherite’ concern to prioritise taming inflation and Truss’s ‘Reaganite’ focus on boosting economic growth, even at the expense of deficit-financed tax cuts.