Seldon Truss at 10

How Not to Be Prime Minister
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-215-6
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

*THE INSTANT #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* 'Enticingly structured... Commendable... The menu is well known, but is deliciously seasoned all the same.' The Times [A] forensic and eloquent evisceration of Truss's chaotic and catastrophic 49 days in No 10' Independent 'A textbook on bad government' Dominic Grieve, Guardian The shortest-serving prime minister in history. The first former leader to lose their seat since 1935. An inside look at how it all went so wrong. Liz Truss's disastrous premiership was the shortest and most chaotic in British history. In the space of just 49 days, Truss witnessed the death of the longest-reigning monarch, attempted to remould the economy, triggered a collapse in the value of Sterling and was forced on a series of embarrassing U-turns that ultimately led to her resignation. The aftershocks of her time in office are still felt today. How did she blow her opportunity so spectacularly? Based on exclusive interviews with key aides, allies and insiders, and focusing on the critical steps that led to her demise, this gripping behind-the-scenes work of contemporary history gives the definitive account of Truss's premiership. Number 1 Sunday Times Bestseller, 8 September 2024

Sir Anthony Seldon is an educator, historian, writer and commentator. A former headmaster and vice chancellor, he is author or editor of over fifty books on contemporary history, politics and education, including Johnson at 10, The Impossible Office?, May at 10, Cameron at 10, Brown at 10, Blair Unbound and The Path of Peace. He's been co-founder of Action for Happiness and the Institute of Contemporary British History, and is founder of the Museum of the Prime Minister.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Seldon, Anthony

Leseproben

1
SECURE THE POWER BASE

7 July–5 September 2022

The response to her was tepid. We all noticed; it didn’t feel right.’

So said a Conservative MP recollecting the atmosphere among fellow MPs the first time that Liz Truss addressed them as Prime Minister. It was Tuesday 6 September 2022. Her premiership was just hours old and the omens were not good.

‘When David Cameron came to speak to us after making the deal to form the Coalition government in 2010, the MPs cheered ecstatically,’ recalled another MP. ‘They did so again when Boris Johnson first appeared before us after winning the December 2019 general election. Even when Theresa May first met us after seeing our majority wiped out in the 2017 general election, there was far more enthusiasm than there was for Liz Truss. She must’ve felt it.’

Not since 1945 had an incoming Conservative leader been greeted with such little excitement by their MPs. Indeed, it is doubtful if any new Conservative PM since 1832 had ever had such a sceptical reception. What had happened?

‘Many Conservative MPs never accepted the result of the leadership election,’ explained the MP. ‘They refused to accept that Rishi Sunak had lost. The campaign to unseat Truss started the very day her election was announced.’

Not all expected Liz Truss to emerge as the successor to Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Not even she herself. Many Tory MPs and a majority of party members in the country never wanted him to go. Yet, in the two months between Johnson announcing his resignation on 7 July, and the announcement of her victory in the leadership competition on 5 September, Truss prevailed. In the process, her premiership was holed below the waterline before it even left the harbour.

Deciding to Run: 7–12 July

‘Come back immediately. The atmosphere is worse even than when we last spoke. The mood in the Conservative Party is beyond recovery.’ Cabinet minister and Truss loyalist Simon Clarke texted these words to her at 8 a.m. on Thursday 7 July, just hours before Johnson announced his resignation. Most inconveniently, Truss was 7,000 miles away in Indonesia for a G20 meeting in her capacity as Foreign Secretary. In the intense tropical heat, she was in a cold funk. The story began thirty-six hours earlier. Health Secretary Sajid Javid and Chancellor Rishi Sunak had resigned within minutes of each other on Tuesday 5 July, sparking speculation that Johnson would be gone within days. Should Truss leave London at all for her imminent trip while her leadership rivals were making hay? But she was mindful of the damage it could do to her cause if she was seen to be abandoning her duty while Johnson was still trying to resurrect his premiership. So she left – as planned – with a small team on the government’s sleek Airbus A321, putting in a stopover at Dubai to refuel. She spoke to Nick Catsaras, her Foreign Office principal private secretary, when the plane touched down in the Gulf, still in two minds about whether to continue further east. Conscious of the positive publicity of her high-profile summit in Bali with Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov, given her strong stance on the war in Ukraine, she was torn between duty and the possibility of the premiership.

Tim Barrow, the Foreign Office political director accompanying her on the trip, counselled pressing on too, as did her husband, Hugh O’Leary. ‘She always listened carefully and respected [Hugh’s] advice,’ said an aide. But her close trio of young special advisers, Adam Jones, Jamie Hope and Sophie Jarvis, thought differently after reading the runes in London. For years, these three had loyally served Truss, and it was partly due to their hard work that she was even in contention in the first place. Fraught conversations followed with her team and supporters. She was also talking to her closest ministerial ally, Work and Pensions Secretary Thérèse Coffey, and to her potential rival, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who said she should stay. ‘She was very careful not to say she was standing, but that she was merely “checking in” with friendly MPs to see how they were feeling,’ said aide Sarah Ludlow, accompanying her on the trip.

The exhausted party arrived in Bali in the early hours of Thursday morning where Truss held meetings with the foreign ministers of Indonesia and Australia. All the time, news was coming in from London, where Johnson’s premiership was visibly disintegrating by the hour. Truss was tortured by her predicament. Part of her had wanted Johnson to remain. She saw him as a pretty useless Prime Minister, above all in not pushing for the Brexit dividends, but in her heart she didn’t feel nearly ready to be PM. ‘Are you sure I’m really good enough?’ she said to one aide, looking for reassurance rather than an honest opinion. The other part of her was absolutely desperate for him to go, while playing it cool on the surface: ‘I’ll go for it only when Boris actually resigns,’ she stressed by phone to the trio back in London. But the news that he was leaving tipped the balance. ‘Liz, wake the f**k up and get back here,’ said Adam Jones, the senior of the three. She needed no encouragement, and barked out brusque instructions for her ministerial plane to ‘refuel for London’.1 She had only been on the ground in Bali for a few hours.

She would need a campaign manager if she was to prevail. In a strong field she was far from being the front runner. Her first call was to the man who had been the presiding maestro over Johnson’s 2019 general election victory, now working for the Conservative Party. ‘I want you to manage my campaign,’ she said to Isaac Levido before the plane left the tarmac in Indonesia. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do it for you. My contract with the Conservative Party wouldn’t allow me,’ he told her. To some of her aides this was an ominous sign that the very best didn’t want to be associated with her. So she went for Ruth Porter, who had first worked for her as a special adviser in August 2014. Her aides pushed back, wondering whether Porter’s experience was suitable. But Truss was adamant. She rated her very highly for her loyalty and capability. Porter promptly left the private sector to head up the campaign.

The plane touched down late on Friday 8 July and she was driven back to her home in Greenwich. Her leadership campaign was nonexistent: no money, website, publicity material, office base or lists of potential supporters. This was ground zero. Her nascent team worked at Truss’s kitchen table. The star recruit was Jason Stein, a brilliant and mercurial communications aide who had worked on-and-off with Truss since 2017 and who had resigned as Prince Andrew’s PR guru shortly before the infamous interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019. A video announcing Truss’s candidacy was filmed in her garden once it had been cleared of weeds and building debris.2

Where was her natural supporter base? Bridges had been burnt with the Remain wing after she emphatically renounced her vote in the EU referendum in her quest to become Brexit Queen. So she reached out for support to right-wing politicians and ardent Brexiteers Iain Duncan Smith, Bill Cash and John Redwood, as well as to financier and Brexiteer Jon Moynihan. ‘If you’re going to run, I’ll help you with the right ideological position,’ he told her. He became her campaign’s energetic Treasurer and, when she needed money, her fundraiser. Well-liked Thérèse Coffey, Truss’s oldest political friend, was tasked to corral MPs. Below them and Stein, Hope specialized on policy, Jones on communications and Jarvis on wooing supporters, at which she was adept. Truss once remarked to her that ‘MPs like you. They don’t like me. That’s why I need you.’3 Reuben Solomon, formerly of Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ), worked on digital communications, and Sarah Ludlow completed the band, having joined several months before from PR company Portland Communications. Within days, Truss had a team.

On Monday 11 July, she announced her platform: promoting growth and cutting taxes. From the outset she committed herself to reversing the rise in National Insurance that Sunak had announced as Chancellor in March 2022 and scrapping plans to increase corporation tax.4 She had her policies. She even had a slogan: ‘Trusted to Deliver’. Next up, she secured a base in Westminster’s Lord North Street (named after the PM ‘who lost America’) owned by Tory supporter Lord Greville Howard. The Moynihan money-till began ringing loudly. She had cash. She had momentum. She was in business.

But she wasn’t yet in the race. According to the rules announced that Monday by Graham Brady, Chair of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, candidates had to acquire the backing of twenty MPs by the following day if they were to make it to the first of the two leadership rounds. Eleven candidates announced their intention to run. ‘I was holding the pen. It was a real struggle whether we’d get those twenty signatures committed by 4 p.m. on Tuesday,’ said loyalist MP Ranil Jayawardena, ‘but we did it by 2 p.m.’ Coffey was her proposer, right-winger Simon Clarke seconder, ‘the idea being to have two Cabinet ministers from different ends of the party’.5 Prominent among the twenty was her near...