Truss has just about survived the rhetoric melodrama, now for the work
Harold Wilson’s maxim that a week is a long time in politics is in danger of becoming a rule for 2022 too. In the last eight days, we have seen the Conservative Party conference take place in Birmingham, the MPs and activists churn themselves into a maelstrom of high drama, and the government abandon its controversial plans to abolish the highest rate of income tax. Of course the cry of “U-turn!” goes up, as it always does, and the new administration’s credibility, already thoroughly battle-scarred, takes another pounding.
The predictions for the yearly party jamboree could scarcely have been more dire. Members of Parliament would stay away, it was predicted, those who turned up in Birmingham would be mutinous and trigger-happy, and the lifespan of Liz Truss’s premiership was beginning to look less healthy than a diabetic chowing down on another burger. Out by Christmas, out in weeks, out before Friday: the prognostications became almost fantastical.
Party conferences are very peculiar gatherings. Politicians usually try to reach out and connect with the electorate beyond the Westminster village, but for one week a year they are encouraged, almost required, to be introspective and solipsistic. This is their time to talk about themselves, to meet face-to-face, to plot, to speculate and to float wild ideas. If it is stage-managed carefully, skilfully and slickly, a party conference can be the best opportunity for propaganda this side of Leni Riefenstahl, but it is a terrible occasion on which to be ill at ease. Famously, in 1963, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had a serious bout of ill health on the very eve of the conference and resolved to resign, allowing the issue of his successor to be played out partly across the halls and back rooms of Blackpool. The result was chaos.
The prime minister did not fall last week. Nor was her position fatally weakened. As well as abandoning the 45p tax rate cut, the conference saw attempts at contrition, conciliation and de-escalation by the new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng. Then, on Wednesday, the stage was set in Birmingham’s International Conference Centre for Truss’s first speech as leader, a potentially pivotal moment for her and her government. The prime minister is not at her best when addressing large audiences, as is now political lore, so it seemed her moment of greatest vulnerability, perhaps the presage of a complete collapse of morale.
Only the most fanatical praetorians would argue that Truss’s speech was a great piece of oratory. But it cleared the low bar her reputation had set with surprising ease. Objectively it was lacklustre, a little stiff, and leaning heavily on platitudes and generic promises. But there were moments when the cheers on the hall were not just of relief, but of genuine support. While she gave few details and left many rhetorical bones unfleshed, there were expressions of ideology which caught the audience’s mood. “Positive” and “enterprising” warmed the faithful’s hearts, and Truss’s “determination” to “step up” and “get Britain moving” showed steel. If she could enact what she promised, the party liked what it was seeing.
The speech needed to save Truss’s premiership, and it did that. It went further, damping down some fires and hauling people more or less into line. In short, it did what it had to, which was arrest the slide into ungovernable chaos and show a leader who might at least be able to govern.
Tomorrow, however, Parliament returns to go back to the routine business of legislation after the solemn hiatus of Elizabeth II’s death and funeral. There must now be a change of gear. Broad, ringing phrases will not work against the hard scrutiny of parliamentarians and the sharp words of the Labour opposition. Work must begin in earnest.
The Health and Social Care Levy (Repeal) Bill is first up, sweeping away one potential new tax. But more legislation to shape Truss’s new economic world will be needed. She and her ministers must be prepared to fight hard and long. They must lay out the details of the Growth Plan, show how it will work, what will happen on the ground, in the lives of ordinary voters. Day after day they must present each small piece of the overall jigsaw.
Liz Truss stopped a catastrophic tsunami sweeping in last week. But the dangerous tide is still high. It will be a brutal run to Christmas, fighting over every policy and every presentational effort to push that tide back down the beach. This is the pivot point, from rhetoric to reality, from poetry to prose. In the words of the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, hard pounding, gentlemen: but we will see who can pound the longest.