What Liz Truss’s Tory conference speechwriters will need to do

A dig at Starmer, a mention of Ukraine – Sean O’Grady ponders what the PM might try in Birmingham

Many of those in the hall in Birmingham will have voted for Truss to be leader (Reuters)

One way of assessing the scale of the task facing Liz Truss at next week’s Conservative Party conference is to imagine drafting her speech for her. It’s a tough gig for anyone connected with Team Truss, even with an unusually sympathetic audience. After all, many of those in the hall in Birmingham, probably a majority, voted for her to be leader.

On the other hand, at 57 percent of the members, hers was hardly a landslide win. If they’d been given the chance, many would have opted for Kemi Badenoch or Penny Mordaunt and a lot of them wanted to stick with Boris Johnson anyway. Since Truss won, not quite a month ago, events may have provoked some buyers’ remorse. Some of her own MPs will also be staying home. Fortunately, the next Budget, to fix the mess made in the mini-Budget, is some weeks away so little may be said about its unpleasant contents.

The first few sentences of the leader’s speech next Thursday write themselves, and will get her off to a good start. There’ll be some lavish praise for the Queen and her example of lifetime service; and some equally lavish but less convincing praise for Johnson and all he did for the party. A couple of standing ovations guaranteed, there, no matter how wooden her delivery is. She might be wise to thank her supporters, and pledge to keep the party united. A brisk mention of the other candidates might draw a line under the recent bloody leadership election. Staying on the winning streak, Truss can then devote a reasonable chunk of oration praising Volodymyr Zelensky, who, if she has any sense, will be beamed in from Kyiv on a giant screen.

Then, the economy and the plan for growth. The basic lines of defence for the recent meltdown are now emerging. First, that the market turmoil was caused by international events and the war in Ukraine (ie nothing to do with the chancellor). Second, the energy-price guarantee, which is universally popular. She can say the mini-Budget had to be delivered because prices were about to go up and there was no time to lose seeking the opinions of the OBR.

The tax cuts can then be championed on the usual grounds – unleashing potential, dash for higher growth and wages, the cuts will pay for themselves, everyone will be better off. They, too, were urgent because the high tax burden was killing growth, she can say.

This is straight from the Thatcher “first-term” playbook – a painful but necessary and unavoidable economic restructuring that is bound to be “controversial” (a better world than “unpopular”, given the polls). But the benefits will eventually come through. We couldn’t go on as we were, she will argue. Creation of wealth is the Tory way; socialists bother too much about distribution and equality. A few token words about protecting the most vulnerable will need to be chucked in. She may well reprise an old Thatcher line: “There is no alternative.” The fact that the pain after the mini-Budget was entirely unnecessary, avoidable and costly to no great purpose will be studiously ignored, as will the near collapse of the pension funds.

Attacks on Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP are a bit trickier than they used to be, post-Corbyn. She can double down on Starmer being a Remoaner, anti-British, pro-high tax, weak and boring, and not to be trusted, whatever he says about the economy and no deals with the SNP.

Somewhere around this point, Truss will repeat her disingenuous leadership campaign spiel about struggling through school in Leeds under a Labour council, and she will do whatever she can to make herself out to be “on your side”. If she’s brave and wants to appear human she’ll make a self-deprecating reference to the “cheese” speech, with some obscure statistic about the success of Britain’s dairy industry. If she can find one.

Truss can try to make a virtue of her stilted speaking style and wary, robotic manner by making out she’s a different, “authentic” leader, unshowy and a serious person (by implication, not Boris) even though the reason she’s so unnatural is precisely that she’s not authentic (she was far more fluent as a teenage Lib Dem activist). Her audience knows by now that she’s weak on presentation anyway, so the bar is set low. Truss will almost certainly do better than Theresa May’s croaky, accident-prone disaster in 2017, when a prankster handed her a P45 and the party slogan fell off the wall. It cannot be as bad as that, can it?

And then a peroration about taking tough decisions, ignoring polls, rejecting U-turns, putting the country first and sending them on their way with the firm belief that massive unfunded tax cuts for the rich paid for by cuts to social security for the poor were the right thing to do all along. It won’t win the next election, but they’ll feel better. At least until the next by-election.