Truss was booted out of office in record time – so why are some still defending the indefensible?

There is strong feeling that low taxes are right and properly conservative, writes John Rentoul

Truss is going to say something about tax cuts before the Budget on 15 March (PA)

There is a lot of idiocy about, although it can be quite hard to pin down. Liz Truss, who was in the US before Christmas talking to Republicans about how she tried to do “too much, too soon”, is going to say something about tax cuts before the Budget on 15 March. But until then, she is not going to offer “a running commentary”.

The front page of the Daily Mail this morning said: “Why we have to cut taxes and go for growth.” The gist of the news story was that the IMF’s gloomy forecast for the UK economy would “add fuel to the growing clamour from business leaders and Tory MPs for Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak to slash taxes and produce a convincing plan for recovery”.

The only actual clamourers were Michael Fabricant, a Conservative MP, who said that “colleagues will say, ‘That’s not enough, Jeremy, you’ve got to give us something more.’” Clamouring by proxy, as it were. And Sir Martin Sorrell, the former boss of WPP, who “said last week that while the Treasury’s purse strings needed to be held tightly for now there must be a ‘clear plan for future growth and tax cuts’”. In other words, he said – last week – that he agreed with the government’s policy.

The problem is that, when Sunak told Conservative members in Morecambe a week ago, “You’re not idiots, you know what’s happened,” many Tories felt affronted, and that their desire for tax cuts was not being respected. So the Daily Mail runs front pages that reflect that feeling, even if no one is actually saying “Liz Truss was right” directly. Not even Liz Truss.

Sunak’s problem is that he is a rationalist, and he is impatient with the truism that all politics is identity politics. Liz Truss, her American friends, Conservative activists and Daily Mail editors – none of them has a workable policy, but they have a strong feeling that low taxes are right and properly conservative.

They do not want to accept “what’s happened” – that there was a pandemic and now a war, which means that the trajectory of the public finances is “not where it needs to be”, as Sunak put it in Morecambe. They just think taxes are too high. The causes don’t matter, but if pressed they will blame the Labour government’s response to the financial crisis and the waste of money borrowed during the coronavirus crisis. Never mind that the banking crash was 15 years ago now; Hunt included it in his “decade of black swan events” in his speech last Friday.

For the low-tax Trussites, the only problem with “austerity” in the Cameron years is that it didn’t go far enough. They pretend Theresa May’s premiership never happened, with its big increase in NHS spending and the adoption of the net zero carbon target; and they are confused as to which Boris Johnson was in power next, preferring to pay attention to the one who pretended that tax rises were nothing to do with him. They blame Sunak for wasting a lot of money on coronavirus fraud as a way of avoiding the logic of their argument, which is either that there should have been no lockdowns, or that jobs and livelihoods should have gone to the wall, or both.

Sunak the rationalist must think that Truss’s 49-day premiership was the most categorical refutation of a political argument in living memory, and yet the “low taxes at all costs” position continues to besiege him. The Trussites have no alternative policy, except to mumble about public spending cuts without specifying what they might be, and yet they are able to conjure the impression that most Conservative opinion is against the prime minister.

The same optical illusion is happening across the floor of the Commons. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, furiously denounced the government today, demanding that Hunt come to the chamber to defend the government against the IMF’s prediction that Britain will have the worst economic performance in the G7 this year.

The chancellor sent a junior minister, James Cartlidge, to respond mildly to her condemnation, in which she said that the question people are asking is whether they are better off after 13 years of Tory government. “The answer is no,” as she said, but then she added: “As the IMF show today – it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Of course, the IMF shows no such thing: it merely predicts what will happen over the next year, having previously said that Truss’s unfunded tax cuts were a terrible idea. So how could it have been different, and how would it be different under a Labour government? Reeves did not say. Just like the Trussites, she is an identity politician. Labour economic policies will be better than Tory ones because they are Labour, even if the policies are essentially the same.