Liz Truss should prepare to be unpopular – at home and abroad

In her first foreign policy speech as prime minister today, Liz Truss is promising a new Britain for a new era, according to Downing Street. Addressing the United Nations general assembly in New York, she says her government would draw up “a new blueprint for our engagement with the world”.

This is a tacit admission the Johnson government, in which she was foreign secretary, underestimated the threat from Russia.

A review of foreign and defence policy published only 18 months ago, which marked a strategic shift to the Indo-Pacific to combat China, is already out of date and will now be rewritten. Doubters in the US administration, who would have preferred the UK to focus on its “own backyard” in Russia, have been vindicated.

John Bew, the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser and one of the few Boris Johnson aides to survive the regime change in Downing Street, will head a No 10-led process to update his own review.

Truss is promising fellow world leaders the UK will be a “reliable, trustworthy and dynamic partner”. She has won some early plaudits on Ukraine, symbolising continuity with Johnson’s approach by at least matching this year’s £2.3bn of military aid next year and boosting defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030. Truss is a passionate advocate of what her aides call “geoliberalism” – the democratic world standing together to combat authoritarian regimes. In her speech, she argues that the fight in Ukraine “must not be a one-off”.

So far, so good. The flaw in the speech is that Truss will not be viewed as “reliable” or “trustworthy” until she sorts a problem she has inherited from herself – the dispute with the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol on goods moving from Great Britain to the province. It puts a black cloud over relations with the US as well as the EU, whose leaders Joe Biden and Ursula von der Leyen she is meeting separately today in the margins of the UN General Assembly.

The mood music on the protocol is more upbeat after politicians came together following the Queen’s death. Truss and Emmanuel Macron avoided the issue in their talks last night to focus on the positives. But whether the more conciliatory mood translates into tangible progress in negotiations on the protocol is another matter. EU sources are gloomy.

They regard Truss’s bill before parliament that would allow the UK to override key parts of the protocol as “a gun on the table”. Brussels officials tell me they want to see evidence that Truss genuinely wants a deal and can dial down the “populist rhetoric” she deployed to hoover up votes in the Tory leadership contest.

Truss has played both Jekyll and Hyde on Northern Ireland. She engaged positively with the EU when Johnson handed her the issue, which her aides saw as a “poisoned chalice” to blunt her leadership aspirations because doing a deal on the protocol was bound to alienate the Eurosceptic right. She even attended a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Ukraine. But once the skids were under Johnson’s premiership, she took a hardline stance to appeal to Brexiteer MPs and party members.

Biden cares deeply about Northern Ireland and fears that Truss’s approach jeopardises the peace process. One reason why she has played down hopes of a US-UK trade deal – trumpeted by Leavers as a big prize before the Brexit referendum – is to prevent the US president using it as leverage in the row over the protocol. If it’s not going to happen anyway while Biden is in power, and it isn’t, she might as well deny him that card.

In her speech, Truss argues that foreign and domestic policies are inextricably linked, saying: “The free world needs this economic strength and resilience to push back against authoritarian aggression and win this new era of strategic competition.”

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On energy security, she is right. But she is overreaching here. She wants other countries to follow her drive to cut taxes because “freedom trumps instruction”. Yet Biden’s attack on the failure of “trickle-down economics” shows that the democratic world is not going to agree on this.

In broadcast interviews in New York, Truss made a virtue out of saying she was prepared to be unpopular at home to take the “difficult decisions” needed to secure economic growth.

This is another echo of Margaret Thatcher and a deliberate break with Johnson, who was so desperate to be liked that he flip-flopped, becoming what his former aide Dominic Cummings called a “wonky shopping trolley”. On one level, Truss’s plain speaking is welcome. At least she gives a straight answer, staring down the barrel of the camera rather than looking away and dodging the bullets as Johnson did. Stand by for a general election in which she plays the “strong leader” while portraying Keir Starmer as wobbly. While voters might never like her, she hopes they might respect her, as many did Thatcher.

Winning respect on the global stage will not be easy.  Unless she stops pandering to hardline Brexiteers so she can resolve the Northern Ireland problem, Truss will also have to be prepared to be unpopular abroad.