MC Feature: The Truss question

She is shaping the right, comical as she might be.

Good afternoon. Today we are sending you a fine piece by Lewis Goodall, a regular contributor of ours. He has turned his attention to Liz Truss’ plan. Morning Call readers can get 20 per cent off a yearly subscription by clicking this button. (Existing New Statesman subscribers can read the piece here.) Join hundreds of subscribers:

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At the 1980 Labour Party conference, Tony Benn, Jim Callaghan’s energy secretary only a year before, took to the floor. The atmosphere was venomous, brimming with political bloodlust. It reached its crescendo with Benn’s speech. He proceeded to read out a list of ways in which the government he had been a senior member of had let down the labour movement. Roy Hattersley, a future Labour deputy leader, later described the speech as a “lie, a poisonous deceit”.

It is not hard to imagine these dynamics at the first post-defeat Conservative Party conference in 2025 – if not from the main platform, then from the stage of one of the fringe groups that now vie for ideological dominance. Further, it is not hard to imagine Liz Truss, the self-described “only conservative in the room”, playing the role of Benn.

In a sense, she is already doing so. In her millenarian Ten Years to Save the West book tour, Truss is cementing one of the biggest PR coups of the decade – by reframing her incompetence and rigidity as being the result of the “economic establishment” and “liberal deep state”.

It is easy to mock but in our vibes-first political age, Truss’s strategy is effective.