LONDON – “Back to her old self again” is how a former colleague described Liz Truss, who made her return to the UK front pages at the weekend.
Sage Sunak and his associates were afraid of this.
Truss, who spent 49 turbulent days in Number 10 Downing Street last year, is back. After a respectable 13-week period of silence, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister explodes back onto the scene with a 4,000-word essay Sunday Telegraph complained that his radical economic agenda had never been given a “realistic chance”.
His first interview In Since Leaving Office, broadcast on Monday evening, he expanded on this, saying he faced “systemic resistance” to his plans as PM and the “level of political support needed” to change prevailing attitudes. ” Not found.
While the reception to Truss’s relaunch hasn’t exactly been encouraging – with a lot of grumbling coming from within his own party – it still presents a real headache for his successor, Sunak, who now has not one but Two unruly former prime ministers must be dealt with from the sidelines.
Boris Johnson is also out of a job but has never been away from the limelight. Recent engagements with the US media and high-profile visits to Kyiv have ensured that his candid views on the situation in Ukraine are well-publicised, even as he charges hundreds of thousands from private speaking engagements around the world.
not wasting time
Truss and Johnson have, in general, opted for sharper and more outspoken returns to pursuing politics than many of their predecessors in the role.
“Most post-war prime ministers have been relatively lucky with their predecessors,” says Tim Bell, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. “They’ve tended to follow the lead [interwar Conservative PM] Stanley Baldwin, who promised in 1937: ‘Once I leave, I leave. I’m not going to talk to the man on the bridge, and I’m not going to spit on the deck.'”
Such a view has never been universal. Ted Heath, prime minister from 1970-74, made no secret of his disdain for his successor as Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher in turn “acted appallingly” – in Bell’s words – to John Major, who had replaced her at Downing Street in 1990 when she was ousted.
But recent Tory prime ministers have kept a dignified distance.
David Cameron quit parliament entirely after losing the 2016 EU referendum, and waited three years before publishing a memoir. Allegedly To avoid “rocking the boat” during the ongoing Brexit negotiations.
And while Theresa May became an occasional liberal-centrist thorn in Boris Johnson’s side, she did so only after a series of careful, low-profile contributions to the House of Commons on topics close to her heart, such as domestic abuse and Rail services his hometown of Maidenhead.
“You might expect former prime ministers to be a little more circumspect in the way they re-enter political debates,” says Paul Harrison, May’s former press secretary. “But then he [Truss] Not a traditional prime minister in any sense of the word, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that she did something very unorthodox.
Truss’s speedy refresh hasn’t been met with rave reviews.
Paul Goodman, editor of the influential grassroots website ConservativeHome, writes “Instead of accepting, moving on, and focusing on the future, she denies, digs up and rediscovers the past,” while Tory MP Richard Graham told Times Radio that Truss’s time in office was “a was the period [people] Rather wouldn’t really remember very clearly.
A long-serving Conservative MP said “She only has herself to blame for her demise, and we are still sorting out some of the mess.” Another applauded his latest intervention with an exploding-head emoji.
trusites forever
But despite Tories’ appeals for calm, Truss and Johnson’s refusal to lie remains a serious concern for the man ultimately elected to lead the party after Truss crashed and burned and Johnson thought it better to try to make a comeback.
Between them, the two former prime ministers have the potential to expose Sunak’s two major weaknesses.
While the truce may never live up to last September’s disastrous “mini-budget” that derailed Britain’s economy, its broader policy agenda still holds the sway of many Conservative MPs, who believe that without them There is no hope of winning the election. This.
That was the rationale behind the formation last month of the Conservative Growth Group, a group of MPs who will carry the torch for a low-tax, regulatory approach to a truce-backed government and which continues to complain of cynicism when it comes to It has very little imagination. supply-side reforms.
Simon Clarke, who was a cabinet minister under the truce, Insisted “She has thought long and hard” about why her approach failed and brought up “important questions” about how the UK handled economic growth in her Telegraph piece.
Other Conservatives are advocating a re-evaluation of the Bank of England’s actions in the period surrounding the mini-budget, arguing that the truce was unfairly blamed for the collapse of the bond market.
But Harrison doubts whether she can be the best advocate for the cause she represents. “There is a question about whether it really serves his interests to push back against a strong prevailing understanding of what happened shortly after he left office.”
Johnson, meanwhile — to his fans, at least — remains the epitome of the star quality and ballot box appeal they fear Sunak lacks.
A government aide who has worked with both men said Johnson’s strength lay in his “undeniable charisma” and persuasive power, while Sunak, more prosaically, said “it was all about hard work.”
These apparent shortcomings lead to a fear among Sunak’s MPs that he is governing too temporarily and, as a colleague recently put itThe “cashmere jumper” needs to be ripped off.
Its was posted That the British prime minister swings back and forth between “jocks” and “nerds”—and Sunak’s nerdiness is more likely to be underlined than a pair of recently fired jocks who refused to be silenced.
trouble ahead
Unfortunately for Sunak, there are at least three big-ticket events coming up that will provide ample ground on which his foes can cause trouble.
There is an upcoming Budget – the government’s annual public expenditure plan – to be held on 15 March. Truss and Johnson are unlikely to be personally involved, but Truss loyalists will make a fuss of themselves if Sunak’s approach is judged to have offered a lack of answers on the development. Scared already.
Earlier, the Truss is expected to make its first public appearance outside the UK a speech on taiwan That could increase the pressure on Sunak over his approach to relations with China.
A person close to him confirmed that China would be “a big deal” for him, and is expected to be a subject of his future parliamentary interventions.
Then there is the small matter of Northern Ireland protocol, the most intriguing unresolved aspect of the Brexit deal with Brussels where tortuous negotiations appear reach an endgame,
Sunak has been sitting with a technical deal draft since last week, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter, and is now gearing up for the unenviable task of trying to broker a negotiated settlement between his party and hardliners. . Northern Irish unionist.
A Whitehall official working on protocol said Johnson “absolutely” had the power to detonate that process, and “he should never be underestimated as an agent of chaos.”
One option touted by onlookers is for Sunak to attempt to gather former prime ministers and ask them to stand behind them on a matter of such great national and international importance. But as it is, it is difficult to imagine such a union.
At the heart of Johnson and Truss’s actions seems to be an essential disquiet over the explosive manner of their departure.
They appear destined to follow in Thatcher’s footsteps, as Bale puts it – “don’t care how much trouble they give to the fad, because in his view, they should never have taken their place in the first place”. Was.”