Zombie Government

At one point during the summer, it looked like Liz Truss might have posed a threat to Labour. This was before Keir Starmer's thinking had caught up with the public's and committed the party to an energy price freeze. For a moment, given that the Tories possess an unerring instinct for power and a propensity to say anything to stay in office, Truss could have made good on the maverick(ish) persona she sometimes affected during the contest and outbid Labour by freezing prices and nationalising the energy firms. That window has long since slammed shut, and it was the Prime Minister who did the closing. How did we get here?

Truss's collapse - what else can we call it - is astonishing and unprecedented because it is entirely self-inflicted. When Boris Johnson took on the remainers in his party three years ago, the prospect of damaging splits were chaos enough. The fact his own brother resigned in disgust at his constitution bending, bullying antics said it all. But there was a sound logic to Johnson's scheme. Having won the Tory leadership contest because he would move heaven and earth to get Brexit done, he knew the majority of MPs and members were on side, and he could rely on the largesse of the capitalist class beyond the usual suspects to see off Jeremy Corbyn. Johnson trashed his party to save his party. He packed the leave vote into the Tory train while the forces of remain were left squabbling in the sidings, and the election went entirely to plan.

Truss on the other hand massively miscalculated. Rather than embrace the political opportunities in front of her, she successfully boxed herself into the worst position possible. The first indication was her cabinet picks. The Parliamentary Conservative Party is not overburdened with talent, but those with experience of government largely stayed on the backbenches as supporters and lickspittles won Truss's favour. Effectively, the antis had no skin in the game making future rebellions more likely. This was a mistake to be sure, but not an insurmountable error - so long as Truss's governments kept playing its cards right.

The second bad call was her energy price freeze. Deciding to protect energy company profits was far from politically adept, but even then her position was salvageable. She might have missed the populist impulse to sock it to suppliers, but the two-year freeze provided some certainty - even if it meant everyone would be paying more. And the fates cut Truss some slack. Provided no one looked too closely at the detail, the rest of the parliamentary party could have gone along with it. They would have remained behind in the polls, but future recovery remained a possibility. Again, provided nothing else went wrong.

The fatal moment was Truss's budget. She did not go for naked Toryism because her and Kwasi Kwarteng are incompetent or blinded by ideology. It was an audacious effort at feathering the nests of their key allies in the City at everyone else's expense. This included large swathes of the capitalist class, and their base among homeowners and pensioners. Stoking inflation and raising interest rates to supposedly stimulate economic growth didn't wash with them, nor anybody else for that matter. Truss must have thought the traditionally reliable guard dogs of Tory support would have lapped it up, but it being 2022 and not 2012 they did not. Rolling back on the 45p tax rate and carrying on as if everything was okay have compounded Truss's woes.

The first week back at Westminster has made matters worse. Stopping Jacob Rees-Mogg from running a Winter energy saving campaign. Home Secretary Suella Braverman scuppered a trade deal with India, while she has been cut out of the upcoming relaxation of immigration rules. Prime Minister's Questions found Truss at her most wooden, but U-turns were extracted on scrapping no fault eviction reform and public spending cuts. By all accounts her appearance at Wednesday evening's 1922 Committee meeting was a disaster. It's one thing to treat the public with contempt by trotting out the same tired sound bites, but quite another to try the same scam on the cognoscenti. Throughout Thursday, the calls in the press for Kwarteng's head have got louder as he announced there would be no reversals on the mini-budget until the actual event on 31st October. And if that wasn't bad enough, the Bank of England's Andrew Bailey is effectively pursuing his own economic policy, such is the dysfunction of this government.

The Truss government is dead in the water. Never before has a government collapsed as quickly and as completely, nor is there any obvious way out. Rish! Sunak is a non-starter, being too divisive. Johnson is away making money (not declared properly, of course), Penny Mordaunt would be torpedoing her own future, and Michael Gove is despised by just about everyone. Short of an election and the Tories suffering the hard reset of annihilation, the most likely outcome is for Truss to keep on shambling on without direction and only slow witted instinct to rely on. It's an overused metaphor, but we are in the month of Halloween. Truss has managed to raise a zombie government.

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