Liz Truss is surprisingly reluctant to take credit for saving jobs

The government is doing popular things on the quiet, and unpopular things out loud, writes John Rentoul

One shadow minister told me she was behaving like someone who had won a prize to be ‘prime minister for a day’ (Getty)

The new business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, was last seen in a top hat at the Queen’s funeral, so no one is going to accuse him of trying too hard to be in touch with the common people.

But he took benign and distant leadership too far today when he seemed reluctant to take credit for the plan to cut energy costs for businesses for the next six months. Perhaps he is embarrassed by the cost, which is unknown and mostly unknowable, although he mumbled something about “tens of billions” of pounds, and admitted that the scheme may well last longer than the six months that was confirmed today – in contrast to the two years for the support for household energy bills.

The size of the state intervention in the energy market ought to be an embarrassment to a government led by a new prime minister preaching the virtues of the free market and the small state. Indeed, although nearly everyone, including groups representing businesses, public sector bodies and charities, has welcomed the help, it has been condemned by the true believers of Liz Truss’s base.

Andy Mayer of the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs said: “Tax cuts and targeted support would have been a more effective solution, encouraging less energy use, while rewarding those who had already invested in energy.”

What is puzzling, though, is that, while Truss is doing a mixture of sensible, expensive and popular things and ideological, trivial and unpopular things, she doesn’t seem interested in taking credit for the popular parts. On the contrary, she seems keen to attract attention for the unpopular policies such as uncapping bankers’ bonuses and letting oil and gas companies keep more of their windfall profits.

Any government that believed in what it was doing would have ensured that it gained days of headlines for such a vast outlay of taxpayers’ money. This one has put out a press release at a time when parliament isn’t sitting, despite MPs being in Westminster to swear allegiance to the King, even though they don’t need to.

Bizarrely, this has ensured that, instead of headlines about a plan that has probably saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of people, much of the media coverage is about the lack of parliamentary scrutiny, because the Commons will be sitting for only Thursday and Friday this week before the Labour and Conservative Party conferences.

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Other headlines have been commandeered by the leak of a cut in stamp duty on house-buying, which Kwasi Kwarteng is expected to announce in his Budget on Friday, and which ministers haven’t denied. That might be popular, especially with people who are about to buy a house, but it will further alienate mainstream economics commentators, who are unanimous that the last thing the housing market needs is a further stimulus to demand.

Truss’s problem is that she doesn’t believe in taxpayer subsidies to pay for price controls, which she used to call “handouts”, but she has been forced by overwhelming political necessity to announce precisely that, in two instalments, one for households and one for businesses and institutions. Meanwhile, she has insisted on repeating her support for policies in which she does believe, regardless of whether they are popular or not.

One shadow minister told me she was behaving like someone who had won a prize to be “prime minister for a day”: she has announced a series of policies that sound as if they have been her hobby horses for years, and she doesn’t seem to care if they damage her chances of winning the next election. No wonder some Labour MPs sound as if they cannot believe their luck.