To avoid the same fate as Johnson and May, Liz Truss needs to get Tory MPs onside – and fast

Much has been made of the in-tray Truss is inheriting – and rightly so – but what awaits her in the Commons isn’t especially pleasant either, writes Marie Le Conte

If Truss doesn’t get a remarkable chief whip, none of the other jobs will matter for very long (PA)

“First as a tragedy, then as a farce” is a good way to describe No 10’s relationship with its parliamentary party over the past six years. Theresa May tried and tried to get her MPs to set the knives aside and support her Brexit plan; she failed. Boris Johnson didn’t try at all and had a jolly old time largely ignoring his own MPs; he fell.

David Cameron’s demise was largely self-inflicted, but he was certainly not helped by those on the Conservative benches who swung for Leave. It’s all quite reminiscent of that old joke: one day God created France, and He built mountains and valleys, rivers and beaches. He looked upon His work and realised the country He had made was too perfect and unfair on the rest of the world, so He filled it with French people.

In short: being a Conservative prime minister would be lovely if it weren’t for Conservative MPs. This is especially true for Liz Truss, who has just won the leadership contest. She was not the MPs’ candidate of choice: her spot in the top two looked uncertain at the start, and she failed to gain the support of a majority of her peers.

In what must have been particularly bruising to the ego, several dozen MPs who’d not backed Truss or Sunak failed to come out for her even after it had become clear that she would win. They could have enhanced their chances of getting a job in September and still they stayed quiet.

There was hope, for a while, that party members would come to her rescue. Johnson got to do as he pleased partly because he was so beloved by Conservative foot soldiers, and polling pointed to a crushing Truss victory. It never came. Instead, she won the vote with 57 per cent, the lowest score since internal party rules changed. Even Iain Duncan Smith did better than her despite not being the MPs’ choice either.

The question is, then, how should she govern internally? As a politician drawn to small-state libertarianism, she will never be able to fully win over the centrists in her party. Though she branded herself as a proud Johnson loyalist, she will never out-Boris her predecessor, and some of the Johnson Ultras will never stop yearning for his return.

What she does have, however, is a faction. Because she has rarely strayed from her wing of the party – represented outside parliament by think tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs – some of her supporters are wont to stand by her through thick or thin.

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She is quite unique in that regard; May won by being the most palatable candidate to the most MPs, and Johnson by being all things to all people. Their support in the parliamentary party was wider, but ultimately shallower. What happens next will, at the very least, be an interesting study in social dynamics.

The first experiment will be the reshuffle: will she fill her front bench with a representative cross-section of the party, and in doing so risk endless stories about government infighting and sniping across the cabinet table? After all, her appeal comes from her unapologetic ideological bent, and not every MP will be comfortable with it.

On the other hand, what would happen if she decided to reward only those close to her? She would probably get more done but face mighty internal opposition. There are few worse enemies in politics than people with too much time on their hands.

Much has been made of the in-tray Truss is inheriting – and rightly so – but what awaits her in the Commons isn’t especially pleasant either. There has been a lot of speculation about who she is planning to appoint at the Treasury, BEIS and elsewhere, but they are the wrong places to focus on. If Truss doesn’t get a remarkable chief whip, none of the other jobs will matter for very long.