Liz Truss is doomed – there is no way she can come back from such a disaster

Conservative MPs should depose the prime minister and install Rishi Sunak, without consulting party members – but they won’t, writes John Rentoul

It is harder to repair a reputation than it is to blow it up in the first place (AP)

It seems obvious to me what the Conservative Party should do, which may be a guarantee that it won’t do it. Tory MPs should depose Liz Truss and install Rishi Sunak without consulting party members. I don’t think anything else will work. If they don’t do it, they will lose the next election.

Normally, it would be unwise to be so categorical, but this does not feel like a normal moment in politics. This feels like one of those big changes, like the winter of discontent in 1978-79 or the exchange rate crisis of 1992.

It is not normal for a party to be 33 points behind in the opinion polls. Even if that YouGov poll was a random statistical freak, the average of the four other polls that surveyed up to yesterday was a 19-point Labour lead, which would give Keir Starmer a bigger majority than any of Tony Blair’s.

But if public opinion can shift so suddenly and so dramatically, could it not shift back again? I don’t think so. It is harder to repair a reputation than it is to blow it up in the first place. Truss may be able to claw back some ground if the price of natural gas falls in the next few months, but so much damage has been done. Her judgement has been found wanting.

Even if borrowing to pay for tax cuts was a good idea, which was unproven until we had seen the effect of the huge energy subsidy, it was politically inept to tilt tax cuts so much in favour of the better-off. It was that lack of basic political competence as much as the extra £10bn a year of unannounced tax cuts that surprised the markets: they could see trouble ahead in a Budget that would be unpopular with the public and with a large number of Conservative MPs.

Then, when things start going wrong, the critical thing is how a leader responds to it. Yesterday, Truss multiplied her problems by giving interviews that failed to show any sign that she understood people’s anxieties about inflation, mortgages and pensions. Instead, she tried to explain again why, because rich people pay more taxes, they gain disproportionately from tax cuts.

Which is the sort of thing you can get away with in the privacy of a Tory leadership election, but when you say it out loud as prime minister everyone can see that you have ignored the possibility of cutting taxes in a way that benefits people on low to middle incomes more than the rich.

Conservative MPs don’t need opinion polls to tell them that this isn’t going to work, but the polls force them to think about what to do about it. Previously unthinkable options, such as voting against the Budget legislation, become thinkable.

Normally, voting against the government on a finance bill would automatically get an MP expelled from the parliamentary Conservative Party, and mean that they couldn’t stand as an official Conservative candidate at the next election. But if they are going to lose their seat anyway, what difference does it make?

Thus there is a serious possibility that the government could be forced to postpone the abolition of the top tax rate, in order to avoid it being defeated in the Commons. But a U-turn, whether it is forced or pretended to be voluntary, will do Truss no good either. In normal times, U-turns are good for governments once the temporary embarrassment fades, assuming the change is from the wrong policy to the right policy. But we have gone beyond that now.

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This unpopular policy is what Truss and Kwarteng believe in, and everyone knows it. The time for them to swivel from a policy adopted for the purposes of a Tory leadership election to a more pragmatic one aimed at the voters has gone, and the voters have noticed.

That is why I think Truss is doomed. Even if she did everything that the voters want, keeping the top rate of income tax, clawing back her other tax cuts from the better-off, and putting up corporation tax, it would be too late now. The voters would know that she didn’t believe in it, and they would still blame her for inflation and rising mortgage rates. Painful public spending cuts would still have to be imposed.

It would only be possible for a government to regain the respect of the voters under a new prime minister, and the only credible candidate – apart from Keir Starmer – is Rishi Sunak. I don’t believe that Conservative MPs have the unity, will and discipline to make that happen, so I think they, too, are doomed.

The next two years may be like the two years before the 1997 election, when most Conservative MPs knew that they couldn’t win, but didn’t know what to do about it.