Fantasy economics will send Liz Truss into No 10 and Britain into a spiral

If Trussism is about her gut instincts, then it is a dangerous doctrine, writes Sean O’Grady

Her speech is a fruit salad of slogans, cliches and faded truisms about low taxes, red tape and waste (PA Wire)

As the nearest thing in British politics to an American-style presidential primary, the Conservative leadership election does at least give the Tory membership and the wider public an opportunity to see how their prospective prime minister will perform under pressure. It is not encouraging.

Both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have been prone to sub-Johnsonian stunts, the terrible virus of “cakeism”, and plain old-fashioned gaffes. Of the pair, Sunak’s have been the more minor and forgivable. His plan to charge £10 for missed GP appointments is clearly the kind of counterproductive gimmicky idea that, if it had any merit, would have been implemented decades before. His unfortunate confession to an audience in prosperous Tunbridge Wells that he dismantled Labour-inspired rules aimed at improving the lot of the inner-city poor should have been a plea on behalf of the many pockets of poverty in the otherwise wealthy shires and market towns of the south and southwest of England. Places such as Clacton or the less favoured districts of Gloucestershire, for example, have much in common with depressed towns in the north of England, Blackpool or the “left behind” bits of County Durham. In reality, of course, Tory ministers have been engaging in a certain amount of pork barrel politics and blatant electoral bribery in marginal seats; but the basic point that “levelling up” is more complex than it looks still stands.

But at least Sunak has had the honesty to confront his party and the country with some tough choices about energy bills and public services – and the pernicious nature of inflation. Trussonomics may be thought of as the social science wing of cakeism – the idea that unfunded tax cuts and public spending can avoid both recession and beat inflation, and all within a two-year electoral time horizon.

Truss, to be blunt, is peddling fantasy economics long since discredited, a kind of mash-up of the “dash for growth” during the Macmillan and Heath eras, as well as a strong dash of Johnsonian boosterism. Added to her harsh attitude to migrants and transpeople, we could call it Trussism. If she is lucky, the economy will survive under such pressure until polling day, after which the boom will turn as surely to bust as any of its predecessors. If not, then she will crash the economy before she can change course or be replaced, no one will care about the Rwanda plan, and a Tory defeat would be inevitable.

Truss, for such a seasoned politician – the longest continuously serving cabinet member – has a serious tendency to drop clangers. There have been at least two in recent days. One was the amateurish plan to cut public sector pay for new starters in the provinces – the kind of thing that a bright PhD student might look into before suggesting it as a policy to be considered; but not a practising politician in a democracy. Truss swiftly executed a U-turn but compounded the original gaffe by claiming her policy had been “misinterpreted”, which it had not, or at least no more than usual with a hostile opposition and sceptical media. If every government had to withdraw key policies because they were “misinterpreted”, there would be no government at all.

Much the same goes for her hideously tone-deaf and apparently casual remark that there’d be no “handouts” for vulnerable, hard-pressed families unable to afford to heat and light their homes. Again, this was excused as being “misinterpreted” by the Truss camp, but with the novel variation that the foreign secretary had been “overinterpreted”, according to former rival and now ally Penny Mordaunt.

It is redolent of Truss’s thoughtless encouragement to gung-ho British citizens who wanted to go to Ukraine to fight the Russians, and one of the launch tweets for her leadership campaign that she would “hit the ground” on her first day in power. If Trussism is about her gut instincts, then it is a dangerous doctrine. Its incoherence is reflected in her language. She seems to lack the ability, valuable in a politician, to engage brain before opening mouth and seems unusually accident-prone. Her speech is a fruit salad of slogans, cliches and faded truisms about low taxes, red tape and waste. For most purposes, she could quite easily be replaced by a word cloud.

Her determination to have an emergency budget to deal with the economic crisis is admirable but, on the record so far, there is every sign that it will be a half-baked disaster. The wonder is why she’s winning, and why her audience of Tory activists are so gullible to have formed the view that Sunak is some kind of evil assassin working on the orders of the European Commission. No matter how poor Truss’s performances are – she makes Theresa May seem as relaxed and polished as Michael McIntyre – and how logical Sunak’s presentations, he cannot cut through. Them’s the breaks, though, as someone once said.