Liz Truss calmed the mood, but failed to save her premiership

Editorial: The prime minister did not explain how tax cuts paid for by borrowing will ever pay for themselves

(Dave Brown)

The prime minister was helped by two Greenpeace protesters who interrupted her speech to the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham to hold up a banner reading: “Who voted for this?”

A reasonable question, but the disruption gave Liz Truss the foil she needed to loosen up after a tense opening section, in which the look in her eyes suggested she thought the representatives might heckle her for having trashed the party’s reputation so thoroughly over the previous 29 days.

When the heckling actually came from a couple of infiltrators, it allowed the assembled Conservatives to unite against a common enemy. More than that, Ms Truss, after an initial flicker of irritation, accepted the rhetorical gift from a group that is sceptical about economic growth, interrupting a speech built on the thesis that the country needs to overcome the “anti-growth coalition”.

In truth, the idea of such a coalition is an Aunt Sally constructed purely for the purpose of giving some coherence to a desperate, back-to-the-wall speech. The idea that Labour is “anti-growth” is unconvincing. At least the opposition did, in recent memory, support the most effective single pro-growth policy, which was to remain part of the European single market.

Ms Truss claimed that Keir Starmer, Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon “don’t understand the British people”, which is odd given that the latter two are in power in devolved administrations and the Labour leader has a 24-point lead in the national opinion polls.

But the Greenpeace demonstrators allowed Ms Truss to pretend briefly that a united Conservative Party was fighting a brave battle against an amorphous network that wants to hold the country back.

She rediscovered some of the poise and fluency of the later stages of the Conservative leadership campaign, and delivered some well-written passages about her beliefs that made sense of her as a person. She has told the story before of being given an air hostess badge as a child when her brothers were given pilot’s badges, and how it had made her “determined to change things”, and she told it well.

What she did not do, however, is what she needed to do if she is to have any prospect of turning round the disastrous start she has made as prime minister. There was no apology for the mistake of trying to cut the top rate of income tax; no recognition that, although there may be a case for a top rate of 40 per cent, now is not the time for it. Because she believes so strongly that people ought to keep as much as possible of their own money, she failed to see how it might look to cut tax for the rich at a time when people on low and middle incomes are facing a steep drop in living standards.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment, sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

She gave no account of how the cuts to the basic rate of income tax and national insurance, which are still skewed in favour of the better-off, even if not so blatantly, can be paid for. Those cuts will not magically increase economic growth, and even if they did, the revenue gained would not begin to cover the additional debt to which she is recklessly adding.

She did not mention the next problem, which is that she cannot cut public spending to try to balance the books, because her own MPs will not let her. The idea that universal credit should be cut in real terms is rightly unacceptable to a majority in the Commons.

Thus her speech ended in a pile of single-sentence slogans, mostly platitudes, apart from the claim: “We have no alternative.” She is going to find, when parliament returns next week, that many Conservative MPs believe that they must find an alternative to her as prime minister, or else the British people will find one at the next general election.