https://spectatorworld.com/topic/britain-new-prime-minister-jeremy-corbyn-liz-truss/
Many years ago, when the earth was young and leaving the European Union was a position espoused only by those trying to stay on the right side of Bill Cash at a drinks party, former British MP Ken Clarke stood for the Tory leadership against Iain Duncan Smith. He said one memorable thing while making his doomed bid for the captaincy — which was that the Tories needed to decide whether they were going to be a political party or a debating society.
What I understand him to have meant by that was that ideological purity buttered no parsnips in politics. For most of its history, its friends and its enemies alike would agree that Britain’s Conservative party has been a magnificent machine for winning and retaining power. While the Left frittered its energy denouncing ideological deviationists, reciting parrot-like dogmas about collective ownership, and purging its own ranks, the Tories were pragmatists. They believed something firmly until it became a vote-loser; and then they found a way of believing something else. I don’t say that as a sneer but as a sincere compliment. Toryism has tended to recognize that there’s no point in having a brilliant scheme for government if you can’t get into government in the first place. Tony Blair struck gold when he had the humility to copy that page of his rivals’ homework.
Liz Truss, who on Monday was selected by Conservatives to be their next party leader and Britain’s newest prime minister, has been doing the same thing on the face of it. She can’t invent and promulgate Trussism until she has her bottom planted on Boris Johnson’s old chair in No. 10. And she can’t plant her bottom thither without the support of the 160,000-odd paid-up members of the Conservative party who select the party’s leaders.
Some people grumble that her policy platforms have been a bit vague, and what specifics we have had — such as her hastily revised scheme to cut public sector pay — are getting pushback from the supposed experts. One police chief has called her policing policy “meaningless.” 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. She has pledged to help those about to be clobbered by rocketing energy bills, though she’s done so by promising what you might describe as “an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
A defense can be made there — and has been — that Truss is doing what politicians always do: she is campaigning in poetry that she might govern in prose. You come up with a series of resonant slogans that don’t tie you down to a specific policy position — “Build Back Better,” “I’m Backing Britain,” “For the Many, Not the Few,” or what have you — wave a few flags and hope for the best. Once you’ve promised your core supporters the moon, you set about gently revising their expectations after you’re safely ensconced in the reality-based world of actual government.
I don’t, by the way, presume here to editorialize on why a Truss premiership will be a Bad Thing, still less to describe the horrible face I made as I read the list of her rumored cabinet appointments. Obviously Liz Truss isn’t specially interested in appealing to soaking wet liberal centrist dads like me — and fair enough. That’s not the game she’s in. She might throw the likes of us a bone come a general election, but we’re a way off that yet. If people like me are complaining that she wants to cut taxes so people can keep more of their own money, rather than spend other people’s money on handouts to the needy, that’s probably a sign she’s doing something right by her natural constituency.
