The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Liz Truss, an unpopular leader for a troubled Britain

Analysis by
Columnist
Updated September 6, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EDT|Published September 6, 2022 at 12:01 a.m. EDT
5 min

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On Tuesday, Liz Truss went to a Scottish castle to call on Queen Elizabeth II and “kissed” the royal hand. The former British foreign secretary thus became her country’s next prime minister. With Truss’s appointment, the queen has now presided over this traditional rite 15 times in her many decades as sovereign. It’s possible, no matter reports of her ailing health, that she may do it all over again soon.

Truss comes to power not via general election but after winning the majority of votes in a Conservative Party leadership election decided by fewer than 200,000 dues-paying Tory activists. Her main rival, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, was more popular among sitting Conservative lawmakers in Parliament. Broader public opinion polls show the opposition Labour Party with its strongest lead in a decade. A majority of Britons, meanwhile, believe Truss will make a “poor” or “terrible” prime minister, and only a quarter consider her an improvement from Boris Johnson, her controversial and polarizing predecessor.

Britain's Conservative Party chose Liz Truss on Sept. 5 to replace Boris Johnson and lead the party and the country. (Video: The Washington Post)

Truss will struggle to muster Johnson’s irrepressible — or delusional, critics would contend — optimism. Darkened skies already hang low over her nascent premiership. “In addition to the war in Ukraine and the fallout of Brexit, the new prime minister will inherit a vast range of economic and political problems,” my colleagues explained. “The Bank of England predicts Britain will suffer through protracted recession, beginning as early as October. Inflation already stands at 10 percent, with economists warning that 15 percent is possible.”

There’s an impending cascade of woes: A mammoth cost-of-living crisis is driving a historic drop in living standards. According to some estimates, two-thirds of British households may face “fuel poverty” by the end of the year, struggling to pay for the surging costs of heating their homes. Across various sectors of the economy, industrial action is picking up, with strikes shutting down train services, garbage collection and the operation of ports.

The queen and her 15 prime ministers

The country that Truss will now lead is unquestionably diminished. Most analyses of the impact of Brexit find that Britain’s departure from the European Union has dented its economy, added to its supply chain headaches and hurt its trading prospects. An analysis published last month by Saxo Bank warned investors that Britain is “more and more looking like an emerging market country” and won’t have the ability to manage “an easy escape” from a deep recession.

Truss campaigned for her party’s leadership on a platform pandering to the Tories’ hard core. She sees a path out of Britain’s problems by slashing taxes and boosting fracking and nuclear energy. “We will break with the same old tax and spend approach by focusing on growth and investment,” she wrote for the Telegraph. While likely welcomed by many Tories who internally elected her, such rhetoric is less convincing to the general public that has seen the Conservatives in power for 12 years.

“Truss’s Britain will be governed by policies lifted from cliched Daily Mail headlines,” wrote leftist commentator Owen Jones in the Guardian. “All the bêtes noires of saloon-bar reactionaries from the past 20 years will be slaughtered, and the resulting anguish from those effete metropolitan lefties obsessed with mere trivialities such as avoiding mass impoverishment and the destruction of the planet will give the Tory faithful their kicks.”

“Economists … have been skeptical about her confidence that all it will take is a few tax cuts to put a tiger back in the national tank,” noted Sam Leith for the right-leaning Spectator, in a piece that wondered whether Truss would be a “Tory Jeremy Corbyn,” a nod to the former left-wing Labour leader whose radical politics swept him to the top role in his party but ultimately hurt Labour on the national stage.

The House of Lords is a bloated relic. Boris Johnson could make it bigger.

It seems Truss’s defining attribute may be a certain brand of political opportunism. “She is a shapeshifting politician,” my colleagues wrote. “She was a centrist Liberal Democrat in her youth before joining the Conservative Party, she argued for abolishing the monarchy before affirming her support for it, and she voted for Britain to remain in the European Union before becoming a hardcore Brexiteer.”

Now fears over her recent hard-line ideological stances are stoking new tensions. Her animus against Scottish independence efforts — and mooted plans to push new legislation that would thwart the possibility of a successful pro-Scottish independence referendum — may set the stage for a clash with Edinburgh.

On Monday, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney warned Truss against provoking a new trade war between Britain and the E.U. if she proceeds with proposed plans to override the post-Brexit agreement known as the Northern Ireland “protocol.” Guided by the desire to preserve the free flow of goods and people between Ireland and Northern Ireland, the protocol mandated checks on goods arriving from the British mainland to Northern Ireland, much to the chagrin of Tories who feel it undermines Britain’s territorial and political integrity.

This week, at least, the governing wisdom appears to be that Truss will adopt a more pragmatic approach once she has taken up residence in 10 Downing Street. But she has a steep hill to climb.

“There is no money, a potential crisis of confidence in the U.K. economy and a fractious and rebellious party to control. Truss will struggle to be the mistress of her own destiny,” wrote Robert Shrimsley of the Financial Times. “She is going to have to be one of the great premiers just to be a merely good one.”