IT took me a while to get this article started because I had to go and scream into a pillow. Yet again the members of the Conservative Party have displayed their unerring ability to pick the best of a bad bunch and have chosen Liz Truss as the new prime minister.
Within seconds of the result being announced Truss showed how committed she was to building bridges and reaching out to the opposing factions within her divided party by completely ignoring Rishi Sunak. The announcement of the new leader of the Conservative Party was carried live on Sky News and BBC News, and not, as you might have expected, Crimewatch.
Still at least we can console ourselves with the thought that Rish! Sunak and his exclamation mark of ambition are having a really bad day. After giving Rishi and his deflated exclamation mark the cold shoulder, Truss went on to give a profoundly uninspiring acceptance speech. She paid tribute to the outgoing prime lawbreaker, telling Johnson that he was admired from Kiev to Carlisle, a phrase which at least acknowledged that admiration for Johnson stops at the Scottish Border.
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We got the robotic and monotone delivery of a vacuous collection of soundbites, speaking very, very slowly as though her batteries were running down. It was a foretaste of what is in store for us over the coming months. There was no vision, no hope, no big picture, nothing to reassure the millions of people who are terrified by the prospect of unaffordable energy bills and soaring food prices - just an insanely ambitious talent vacuum who was clearly way out of her depth but far too self-regarding to see it. The Conservative MPs watching her, most of whom backed Sunak in the early stages of the contest, must have been thinking, "Oh God, we are so, so screwed”.
Although it had been widely expected that Truss would win, the result was much tighter than polling had forecast. In the end, she won 57% of votes on a turnout of 82.6%, an outcome which means that she becomes the new party leader and Prime Minister despite failing to win the support of more than 50% of the total electorate or 60% of votes cast, the standards that she reportedly intends to impose on the Scottish electorate in another independence referendum. Even the truly dire Iain Duncan Smith did better than that. The size of victory for Truss is the smallest in the history of Conservative leadership contests that went to a membership vote. By Truss's own standards then, she has no right to be prime minister. But then she's a Tory, and the only standards that she recognises are double standards.
It seems clear that despite their initial enthusiasm, the more that Conservative Party members saw of Liz Truss, the less they liked her, a pattern which is set to repeat itself across the UK as a whole, most of which did not have a high opinion of her to begin with. The membership of the Conservative Party is far more right-wing than the public as a whole, yet even they found Truss more unappealing the more that they saw of her. Truss's campaign seemed to be aware of this and took steps to reduce her exposure to difficult questions, withdrawing from high-profile interviews with Andrew Neil and the BBC's Nick Robinson.
Truss will be unable to avoid such scrutiny as prime minister, her shortcomings will be exposed at PMQs and during the media interviews that any Prime Minister must participate in. Given that Truss has all the charisma of a burst crisp packet blowing forlornly along the street on a wet Wednesday in Middlesborough, and the presentational skills of a broken PowerPoint projector, the wider public will turn against her even more rapidly than the Conservative party will.
Truss will certainly enjoy a honeymoon period, one which will be enthusiastically promoted by a right-wing media which realises that her term in office is likely to end with the Conservatives being kicked out of power by an angry and increasingly desperate electorate. It's a honeymoon period that will be short-lived, however.
If the reports of Truss's cabinet choices are accurate, she will be a prime minister who is hostage to the frothing right wing of the Conservative party and will be unable to bridge the divisions within her own party never mind the divisions that the Conservatives have created within the UK as a whole.
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