Why the prime minister needs Liz Truss to keep quiet

Next week, Britain’s shortest ever serving prime minister, Liz Truss, will be giving her side of the story that led to her downfall. Doubtless, her book, Ten Years to Save the West, will stimulate renewed debate about the economic wisdom of her attempt to make a “dash for growth” via unfunded tax cuts. There is little doubt, however, that with a general election looming her party is struggling to escape the adverse political consequences of her brief tenure in 10 Downing Street.

Not that her party was in the best of health when, on 5 September 2022, her victory in that summer’s long leadership battle with Rishi Sunak was announced. The Conservatives were already six points behind Labour on average in the polls when Boris Johnson’s government collapsed at the beginning of July, thanks largely to the revelations about “Partygate”.

However, the ensuing leadership contest – and the looming energy price crisis – saw the Tories’ position weaken even further. Standing at just 31 per cent in the polls, the party was trailing Labour by 10 points when Truss was declared its new leader.

Still, that was far from necessarily a potentially irrecoverable position. During the second half of 2012 and the first half of 2013, the polls had regularly put the Conservatives 10 or more points behind Labour, yet David Cameron landed an overall majority in the general election two years later. At worst, the polls pointed to the possibility of a hung parliament in which, perhaps, a minority Labour administration would not survive for long.

Indeed, the Tory position in the polls actually edged up slightly during the pause in political activity occasioned by the death of Elizabeth II, just two days into Truss’s premiership.

However, no sooner had Truss’s chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, sat down after unveiling the “dash for growth” in his fiscal event and the value of the pound began to fall on the financial markets, the cost of government borrowing rose sharply, and the pensions industry was facing a potential crisis.

The public took their cue from the markets – just as they had done after Black Wednesday in September 1992, when the pound was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Within a week of the fiscal event, the Conservatives’ average standing in the polls had fallen by five points to just 27 per cent, leaving the party as much as 21 points behind Labour.

Things did not get any better thereafter as Truss struggled to deal with the political and fiscal turmoil that her announcement had unwittingly unleashed. By the time she had decided, three weeks later, that she should resign, her party’s average rating in the polls had fallen yet another five points, to just 22 per cent, Labour were now a whopping 31 points ahead, an advantage it had not enjoyed since the earliest days of Tony Blair’s New Labour government.

Sunak was installed as her replacement in the hope he would be able to turn things around. Indeed, within a week of his taking office, the Conservatives had regained three points in the polls and were now a somewhat more modest 25 points behind.

Yet, for the most part, little progress has been made since. Indeed, at 24 per cent, the party’s current standing in the polls is no better than it was shortly after Sunak took over. True, Labour has not been able to sustain the 50-plus rating the party enjoyed at that point, but at 43 per cent, Labour still holds a commanding 19-point lead.

Meanwhile, the rise of Reform, now running at 12 per cent in the polls, has made life even more difficult for the Conservatives as they find themselves losing votes to their right as well as to their left.

Sunak is, of course, hoping that the spring shoots of an economic recovery will enable him to float the Tory boat between now and polling day. However, Truss did long-term damage to what is usually one of her party’s key assets – its reputation for economic competence.

According to YouGov, the proportion naming the Conservatives as the best party to run the economy fell from 24 per cent shortly before Truss took over, to just 15 per cent by the time she was ready to leave Downing Street. At 19 per cent, the party’s current rating still leaves it trailing Labour by six points on this key issue.

Sunak not only has to persuade voters that he is delivering an economic recovery but also to erase Truss from their memory and be prepared to give him and his party the credit. And it looks as though that is likely to prove difficult.

John Curtice is professor of politics at Strathclyde University, and Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research and ‘The UK in a Changing Europe’. He is also co-host of the podcast, ‘Trendy’