Inside Politics: Back to school

Winner of Tory leadership contest announced later today as favourite Liz Truss mulls freeze on energy bills, writes Matt Mathers

(Getty Images)

Hello there, I’m Matt Mathers and welcome to The Independent’s Inside Politics newsletter.

At last – it’s over. The Tory leadership contest has finished. I’m now 63 years old, the energy price cap has risen to £21,578 per year and Arsenal’s long wait for a top four Premier League finish continues. MPs are back to school today following the summer recess. It’s going to be a busy week in politics so let’s get stuck in.

Inside the bubble

Commons action kicks off at 2.30pm with Home Office questions. After that comes any urgent questions or statements. Later, the main business is the second reading of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill.

Winner of the Tory leadership contest is announced at 12.30pm.

Daily briefing

Freeze

The fun and games are over and Liz Truss now faces the most challenging in-tray of any prime minister probably since Margaret Thatcher – the woman she hopes to emulate if, as expected, the Tory Party crowns her its new leader at lunchtime today.

Everywhere Truss looks there is trouble, much of it interlinked: a war in Europe, soaring energy bills, rising inflation and growing strike action. First on the to-do list for the would-be PM is how to help households with their soaring gas and electricity bills – a policy area that will consume Truss once she walks through that famous black door and one that threatens to define her entire premiership. Labour leader Keir Starmer, who made a fresh pitch to voters yesterday, saying Labour will prioritise common-sense over ideology, still has a lot of work to do, but if Truss gets the bills crisis wrong she could well see her party swept aside at the next general election.

During a nervy appearance in the inaugural Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC yesterday, Truss promised that she would announce a package of support to ease the squeeze – which some reports put at £100bn – within her first week in office. But there was still no detail on what form that financial assistance would look like. She also refused to rule out a freeze on bills. And lo and behold some of this morning’s papers carry reports that Team Truss is in contact with industry sources about how to do just that. Expect further details about this – and the wider financial package – to drip out in the coming days.

As if the domestic and foreign policy issues weren’t difficult enough, the new PM will also have to contend with uniting a party that is arguably more divided now than before the brutal leadership contest to replace the Big Dog Boris Johnson began eight weeks ago. Given the summer of bloodletting in the Tory ranks, that looks like no easy job and Team Truss should be concerned by the fact that some 200 MPs failed to publicly back her. The foreign secretary will start with just a few MPs less than Johnson did but in reality, her working majority is likely to be much smaller.

Sunak supporter Michael Gove, the former levelling up secretary, recently refused to say if he would back Truss’s tax cuts and economic agenda – which would be an effective no-confidence vote. All the signs suggest Gove will be joined on the backbenches by the former chancellor, who some believe could become a natural centre of resistance for rebels – a grouping of whom are reportedly already on manoeuvres to oust her. Once Truss has finished putting her cabinet together there will be a number of highly-flying MPs, unsupportive to her, who will find themselves passed over once again for big government jobs. With a period in opposition looking increasingly likely, these MPs may feel they have nothing left to lose and could cause major headaches for Truss when she tries to get legislation through the Commons.

Perhaps the fun and games aren’t over after all – maybe they’re just getting started. The next few weeks and months are set to be another fascinating period in UK politics. Stay tuned to Inside Politics as we do our best to guide you through all the twists and turns.

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Stay calm

Today will be all about Truss but Kwasi Kwarteng, the man hotly tipped to become her chancellor – and whose job will be just as difficult – is around and has a piece in the Financial Times. In a sign that the business secretary is trying to allay concerns about his boss’s economic agenda, the business secretary insists that the next government will behave in a “fiscally responsible” way.

The fears about the foreign secretary’s tax-cutting plans are well documented, and as Hamish McRae writes (below), City bosses have been less than convinced about what Truss has had to say during the leadership campaign. Kwarteng said that there would be “some fiscal loosening” in a Truss administration to help households through the winter, stressing that it was the “right thing” to do.

He added that the UK does not need “excessive fiscal tightening”, pointing to the UK’s ratio of debt to GDP compared to other major economies.

“The OECD has said that the current government policy is contractionary, which will only send us into a negative spiral when the aim should be to do the opposite. But I want to provide reassurance that this will be done in a fiscally responsible way. Liz is committed to a lean state and, as the immediate shock subsides, we will work to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio over time,” he wrote.

He also promised that the Treasury would be “decisive and do things differently”.

On the record

Truss refuses to rule out opposition parties’ call for price cap freeze.

“I’m not going to go into details of what a putative announcement would be before because I think it would be wrong to do that.”

From the Twitterati

Opinium pollster Chris Curtis feels the pressure after calculating a Truss win.

“Just crossed my mind that I could be humiliatingly wrong tomorrow, so I’m probably not getting any sleep tonight.”

Essential reading

• Hamish McRae, The Independent: The markets are worried about Liz Truss as prime minister
• Kate Devlin, The Independent: The Tory MPs who fear a swing to the right under Liz Truss
• Andrew Grice, The Independent: What’s next for Boris Johnson and divided Tories
• Colin Kidd, The New Statesman: Britain at the mercury of the Tory Party faithful

Inside Politics first appeared in our daily morning email. You can sign up via this link.