We’re heading for a Liz Truss victory – here’s what I got wrong

Good forecasters go back over their predictions to try to learn from their mistakes – and I thought Rishi Sunak would win, writes John Rentoul

Fundamentally, though, I misjudged the mood of the Tory grassroots, which wanted to be told fairytales (PA)

Dominic Cummings is not the only person who has read Superforecasting, the book by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. I read it when it was published seven years ago, and thought it had important insights that would be useful in politics.

The book cites a wonderful example of hindsight bias. Tetlock asked experts in 1988 to put a percentage on the chance that the Communist Party would lose its monopoly on power in the Soviet Union in the next five years. Three years later, the Soviet Union was dissolved: “So in 1992-93 I returned to the experts, reminded them of the question in 1988, and asked them to recall their estimates. On average, the experts recalled a number 31 percentage points higher than the correct figure.

“So the expert who thought there was only a 10 per cent chance might remember herself thinking there was a 40 or 50 per cent chance. There was even a case in which an expert who pegged the probability at 20 per cent recalled it as 70 per cent – which illustrates why hindsight bias is sometimes known as the ‘I knew it all along’ effect.”

I vowed at the time to resist the “I knew it all along” effect, and to apply the lessons of Tetlock and Gardner’s research to my own writing. One lesson above all: good forecasters go back over their old predictions honestly, and analyse why they got them wrong in an attempt to learn from their mistakes.

So now, as the Conservative leadership campaign is all over bar the announcement that Liz Truss has won, the final words from Boris Johnson in Downing Street and her first words before going in the black door, now is the time to look back and try to understand what I got wrong about our new prime minister.

I have been back through the records, and the first time I noticed her was in a note I wrote for myself before the 2010 election, listing “interesting candidates, as defined by me”. She was one of seven Tories, along with Nick Boles, Jo Johnson, Kwasi Kwarteng (“Old Etonian who is supposed to be v clever”), Jesse Norman (“philosopher of cooperative and compassionate Conservatism”), Bob Stewart (“Bosnia rent-a-quote”) and Rory Stewart (“irritatingly precocious Etonian”).

(My Labour list was: Luciana Berger, Liz Kendall, Anas Sarwar, who failed to be elected in Glasgow Central, Stephen Twigg, Chuka Umunna, “much hyped lawyer”, and John Woodcock, “former spokesperson for Gordon Brown”. But more about them another time.)

Truss was on the list because I had “read all about her”, thanks to the attempt by the “Turnip Taliban” of South West Norfolk to deselect her after she had been chosen, because they felt she hadn’t been open about a past affair. As a result, she had been profiled in the newspapers and seemed to have a bit more to her than the average candidate.

I am not saying I spotted her first, although I do also have a note of a conversation with Lynton Crosby, the Australian consultant brought in by David Cameron to run the 2015 election campaign, in which he mentioned her (she was then at Defra and about to be promoted to justice secretary) as one of the Tories to look out for after the election. Apart from Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, he said, the party had Theresa May, “Saj” (Sajid Javid), Liz Truss, Matt Hancock, Iain Duncan Smith and Priti Patel. “That’s a lot more than Labour have got.”

However, when it came to this leadership contest, I initially thought that Rishi Sunak was going to win, and that his final-round opponent might be Penny Mordaunt. My main mistake was to put too much weight on Truss’s vote for Remain in the referendum. I discounted opinion polls suggesting that she was popular among party members because I assumed that many members didn’t know that she was a Remainer, and that when they were reminded by supporters of Leaver candidates, including Mordaunt, they would switch.

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What I had not appreciated was the extent to which Sunak was “coded” as a Remainer. I knew his wife’s non-dom tax status and his US green card were damaging – indeed I briefly thought that Dominic Cummings was right to say in the spring that Sunak was “out of it” because of them. What I hadn’t realised is that they marked him out as a member of the global elite and therefore a Remainer by tribe, if not by vote.

Equally, I allowed my view of Truss’s trade deals as mere bureaucratic tidying-up after the rupture of Brexit to colour my assumption that Tory members would see through her Brexit posturing. I also failed to realise that Sunak would get the blame for bringing Johnson down, possibly because I felt strongly that the prime minister was the author of his own misfortune.

Finally, I thought that Sunak would be better at politics than he was. He (and I) misjudged the gap between MPs, who value ministerial competence and parliamentary skill, and party members, who prize ideology and bashing other parties (“ignoring” Nicola Sturgeon, for example). He failed to adjust from an insider campaign in parliament to an outsider campaign in the party.

Fundamentally, though, I misjudged the mood of the Tory grassroots, which wanted to be told fairytales, even though they knew they weren’t true.