The moment of truth for Liz Truss is nearly upon her

It has become clearer by the day through the Conservative leadership contest that, if Liz Truss won, her publicly avowed policies would have to be … adjusted. How successfully she makes that adjustment will, I think, determine whether or not she has a chance of surviving until the next general election.

Her only policy that has mattered during the campaign has been “tax cuts”. She hasn’t specified what form these will take, beyond saying that she would “reverse” the rise in national insurance contributions imposed by her opponent, Rishi Sunak. Except that he partially reversed the rise in July, tilting the benefit towards the low paid, so that a straightforward reversion to the position before April would make the low paid worse off and deliver big gains to top earners.

In any case, tax cuts alone cannot protect the poor from higher energy bills. Truss has said vaguely that she will do what she can to help people, but she has got through the entire campaign without addressing the scale of the problem. But on Tuesday at about 4pm, when she returns from seeing the Queen at Balmoral, she will have to speak to the nation in Downing Street before starting work as prime minister.

I think the nation will expect to hear some plain speaking about the seriousness of the energy crisis that faces it, rather than the blithe optimism about a recession not being “inevitable” that Truss has repeated during the campaign.

And it will want something more specific than “help is on its way”. She will need to say more about how pensioners, those on benefits, people on low to middle incomes and small businesses are going to be helped, and about the balance between targeted and universal help. Which is likely to sound rather different from the small-state rhetoric of the past two months.

But the real test of her premiership may come in the next few months. At the final hustings on Wednesday, she gave up two hostages to fortune. When asked if she was saying, as George Bush Sr did, “Read my lips: no new taxes,” she said: “Yes, no new taxes.” More specifically, she ruled out a new windfall tax on oil and gas producers beyond what Sunak imposed in May.

What is more, she promised that there would be no rationing of energy. If the oil and gas companies make even bigger windfall profits as international prices continue to rise because of a war, and if gas supplies run short, those pledges will be tested.

Someone who has known her for 30 years was quoted by The Times on Saturday about her shrink-the-state conservatism: “When she gets into No 10, don’t be surprised if she shrugs off some of that and metamorphoses again.” If she can pull that off, it will be a miracle.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator