Truss is gone – and the air at Westminster is thick with plots

No matter who wins or how they get there over the next week, there is no guarantee the Tories will put the divisions and instability of the short Truss era behind them

After Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Liz Truss had reason to believe she had survived in her job, for a while at least. Her critics were convinced she would still die another day and vowed to remove her soon after the chancellor Jeremy Hunt presented his medium-term fiscal plan on 31 October. They said they did not want to further destabilise the financial markets before his crucial statement.

These calculations suddenly changed when Truss sacked a second senior cabinet minister inside a week, Suella Braverman, and during yet another self-inflicted wound by Truss’s shambolic Downing Street operation. It managed to turn a routine Labour opposition attack – in staging a Commons vote on fracking – into the catalyst for the prime minister’s dramatic resignation today.

Utter confusion over whether the vote was a confidence issue – meaning that defying the government could see Tory MPs lose the party whip – saw the dam burst. Truss suffered a haemorrhage of support among her furious and depressed backbenchers.

As rumours of her imminent demise spread through a feverish atmosphere in Portcullis House inside parliament today, one senior Tory told me: “The voting shambles has accelerated things. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. So it became a question of doing it sooner rather than later – before the fiscal plan rather than afterwards.” Truss’s successor will be chosen within a week, so they will sit alongside Hunt during his statement.

Little more than 24 hours after declaring she was “a fighter, and not a quitter,” Truss bowed to the inevitable and quit, admitting she could not deliver the mandate on which she was elected this summer. She has her place in history, but not in the way she wanted, as the UK’s shortest-serving PM, after just 45 days in office and not the power she envisaged.

But she is no victim of another act of Tory regicide; Truss destroyed her own premiership, unable to recover from last month’s catastrophic mini-Budget, and £45bn of unfunded tax cuts which spooked the financial markets.

What happens now? Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 committee of Tory MPs, suggested there would be an online ballot of the party’s 170,000 members after the MPs have whittled down the candidates to a shortlist of two names in a series of exhaustive ballots.

However, the air at Westminster today is filled with plots that would deny the grassroots members a vote. Some Tory grandees want the leading candidates to “lock themselves in a room” and agree on a “coronation” for one of them. Only one problem: for now, the fractious Tories cannot unite around a “unity” candidate.

A variation on this theme might have more chance of coming to fruition. One Tory grandee told me that all the candidates should “sign in blood” that if they reached the shortlist of two but came second in voting among MPs, they would stand aside for the winner. Then grassroots members would not get a vote. This happened in 2016, when Andrea Leadsom withdrew from the Tory race and Theresa May became PM. But many activists would be furious if they were cut out.

The 1922 executive might try to streamline the process by setting a high bar for the number of nominations each candidate needs – say, 50.

Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, who came second to Truss this summer, and Penny Mordaunt, the Commons leader, who finished third, are the names on the lips of many Tories. Some would like them to form a “dream team”. But although Mordaunt backed Hunt for the leadership in 2019, neither seems minded to make way for the other at present. Pressure to do so will now increase.

Sunak’s experience at the Treasury makes him the best bet in my view. He has been tested in a crisis, the pandemic, and passed. Mordaunt has not been. She would make a good foreign secretary and deputy PM, with Hunt remaining as chancellor.

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But there are other potential candidates. There are signs that Boris Johnson may try to make a remarkable comeback less than two months after being booted out of Downing Street by his own party. Some MPs and many grassroots members want him back. It would be a huge mistake.

The Commons privileges committee is investigating whether he lied to parliament over Partygate. Many voters would surely write off backing the Tories if they brought him back. I suspect Tory MPs will find a way to block his return.

Braverman is well-placed to become the candidate of the Tory right after being dismissed as home secretary following a row with Truss over the outgoing PM’s plan to relax immigration rules to fill skill shortages. But Kemi Badenoch, who progressed further than Braverman in this summer’s contest, might be a stronger contender.

No matter who wins or how they get there over the next week, there is no guarantee the Tories will put the divisions and instability of the short Truss era behind them. If Sunak, the early favourite, gets the job at his second attempt, he will have a band of bitter enemies on the backbenches who could make his life a misery. As one ​minister put it: “My fear is that the parliamentary party has become ungovernable.”