If the first job of any new prime minister is putting together a strong cabinet, Liz Truss has already failed

Editorial: If the rumours are to be believed, Liz Truss, putative and probable next prime minister, is about to create the most right-wing, reactionary, unpersuasive cabinet since the before the Second World War

3 September 2022 (Dave Brown)

One of the first tests of any prime minister is their skill in cabinet-making. Will they select the most appropriate people for the job? Balance the different strands of opinion (ie factions) in their party? Reward friends and supporters without creating too many new enemies? Above all, put together a strong, cohesive team with exceptional communication skills?

If the rumours are to be believed, Liz Truss, putative and probable next prime minister, is about to create the most right-wing, reactionary, unpersuasive cabinet since before the Second World War.

It is normal for a party that has been in power for 12 years to be tired and short of talent, but Ms Truss seems to be going out of her way to prove the point. Her choices for the top table seem to echo the general approach she took during the leadership election: she told the activists what they wanted to hear, and now she is going to promote their favourite personalities, whatever the other 99.9 per cent of the country makes of them.

By far the most important appointment is that of the new chancellor. By common consensus, this seems sure to be Kwasi Kwarteng. Mr Kwarteng has many qualities. He is smart, articulate, self-assured, and a considerable scholar of history. These things will serve him well, but he also has flaws that may prove tragic.

He may be extremely clever, for example, but he is still not quite as clever as he thinks he is, and this streak of arrogance looks likely to be his undoing. Perhaps it is the product of a deeply subterranean sense of insecurity, but it is not an attractive quality in times that cry out for humility and compassion. He seems determined not to trouble the energy giants for more tax, even as they virtually beg him to levy a windfall tax on them, and this will severely limit his ability to ameliorate the cost of living crisis in a responsible fashion.

Mr Kwarteng and Ms Truss seem united in their resistance to “handouts” – a loaded, unfortunate phrase – and in their determination to engineer a reckless “dash for growth”. This will be inflationary, and will crash the economy; the markets are already signalling higher interest rates, a recession, and a burst of inflation at around 20 per cent. Ms Truss is fond of declaring, boosterishly, that recession is “not inevitable”. She is right about that, but her policies are almost certain to bring about a longer and a deeper one, with all the economic carnage that implies.

There is no amount of spin or talking up Britain that will disguise the crash the country is headed for. When her backbenchers wake up to the gamble she and her chancellor are taking with their jobs, they will simply rebel, and very possibly in sufficient numbers to defeat Ms Truss’s first emergency Budget. There is a wry chance this will happen.

In an ideal world – indeed, in the less absurd one we lived in not so many months ago – it might have been possible to envisage Ms Truss and Rishi Sunak serving together in cabinet, with Mr Sunak carrying on at the Treasury. Now, such a scenario is fantastical.

More likely, Mr Sunak will join with the likes of Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and Grant Shapps (none of whom are likely to be in the new government) to form a bloc of fiscally responsible Tories determined to stop Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng from wrecking the economy (and the Conservative Party with it).

No doubt Priti Patel, the soon-to-be-ex home secretary, will also prove a dangerous enemy, but she has a smaller fan base in the parliamentary party than Mr Sunak and Mr Gove, the Statler and Waldorf heckling from the balcony at the Truss-Kwarteng Muppet Show.

Talking of which, there’s also little reason to look forward to the other key promotions being put about by the Truss camp. James Cleverly at the Foreign Office, for example, doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Therese Coffey at Health will surely find playing the empathic nurse to the nation a more difficult, indeed unnatural role. And you have to wonder what British business has done wrong to deserve Jacob Rees-Mogg being put in charge of its destiny. The alternative roles mooted for this haunted Victorian pencil are to be chief secretary to the Treasury or to make real the chimera of levelling up. Chilling.

Plainly, Ms Truss believes that stirring up culture wars will help her to win a general election in the middle of a slump, and to that end, the unreal prospect of Suella Braverman being appointed home secretary presents itself. She is being given this post simply because she managed to garner 27 votes and come sixth in the leadership election – and because she will wind up the opposition.

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Much the same goes for Kemi Badenoch’s bombing raid on schools and universities, demanding platforms for cranks and banning talk of diversity, a multicultural society and tolerance. Again, this sort of social ultra-conservatism is completely at one with contemporary Conservative trends, but wildly at odds with the way people live their lives now. It may well motivate the “base” to vote Tory next time, but it’ll offend everyone else.

There are even signs that Nadine Dorries won’t, after all, be packed off to the House of Lords, and that Iain Duncan Smith and John Redwood may make unlikely comebacks to the front line. Whatever else may be said of Mr Duncan Smith and Mr Redwood, neither is what is known in political circles as a “retail politician”.

So, by this time next week, Ms Truss will have crafted the most divisive, if not offensive, cabinet; she will have divided her party still further, alienated key figures, and put the economy on the path to inflationary destruction.

Person for person, Labour’s front bench looks far stronger than Team Truss, and they won’t even have to try too hard, such will be the steady delivery of unforced errors. “Trust Liz” will take on a whole new, richly ironic, meaning.