The (relative) tranquillity since Conservative conference is deceptive
A party conference is a bit like Christmas, and not only because everyone is drunk a lot of the time: it’s great when everyone’s getting along, but also the most conducive possible environment for tensions to burst into the open when they’re not. So if things have seemed quiet since the Tories left Birmingham, it’s all relative.
“Coming when it did, conference really just poured petrol on a crisis,” Katy Balls said. “Having a very dysfunctional party not all be in the same room means things look calmer, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the problems went away. It just meant the pressure cooker was off for a few days.”
Now, with MPs back at Westminster, we’re finally into the first sustained “normal” run of Truss’s premiership, after her first couple of weeks were written off by the death of the Queen. (An unkind Economist leader yesterday suggested that her grip on power has already gone, and calculates that seven days of real control constitutes “the shelf-life of a lettuce”.)
Be that as it may, a return to normal is a double-edged sword for the prime minister, for whom the practicalities of ordinary Westminster politics may help temper the mood of untethered chaos – but whose enemies are now in the same place, at the same time, with plenty of opportunities to cause trouble.
There’s not an immediate threat to her position …
Despite some breathless talk of no-confidence letters, Katy is sceptical that any fundamental challenge to Truss’ position is imminent, in part because backbenchers have no widely shared diagnosis of the severity of the problem. “Some of them think they’ve already lost their seats. Some of them think they have time to turn it around. Others genuinely believe tax cuts are the answer, and they just need to stay the course and things will get better.”
Ironically enough, the fact that the parliamentary party has been through the trauma of defenestrating a leader already this year, and knows just how rough the results can be, may actually protect Truss: “One longstanding MP told me that things would have to get worse before they’d get rid of her. A lot of them just don’t have the appetite for a leadership contest.”
One obvious boiling point might be Kwasi Kwarteng’s expedited fiscal statement, now due on 31 October. “You never know what the thing will be that will make things blow up,” Katy said. “But there aren’t conversations about ‘they have until this date to fix things’. We’re not in that territory yet.”
… but some backbenchers are very unimpressed
If you are here for the schadenfreude, you may find it in the fact that while Truss’s position as prime minister doesn’t appear to be imminently at risk, the mood is nonetheless one of “despair”. Yesterday afternoon, Katy rang around some backbench MPs asking how Truss might win them over. “One of them said they were going to quote Blackadder,” before following up with the title character’s assessment of what Field Marshal Haig would need to do to boost morale: “Immediate resignation and suicide.”
That doesn’t exactly suggest a party uniting behind its leader. MPs who are not ready to force Truss out may still rebel in parliamentary votes, be vocal about their opposition to parts of her supply-side agenda in an attempt to persuade their constituents that it’s not their fault, and generally cultivate an atmosphere that will make it very difficult for Truss to get on the front foot.
The need to appease
“In the initial days after the not-so-mini-budget, No 10 was almost alarmingly calm,” Katy said. “There’s been a gradual realisation since then of how serious the situation is.” In the last few days, Truss has made a series of concessions to backbenchers and the markets in an attempt to mitigate that.
After Conor Burns was sacked as a trade minister over allegations of serious misconduct at conference, Greg Hands, a key supporter of Rishi Sunak, was appointed as his replacement. Katy reported in a Spectator piece on Monday (£) that while it was a tacit acknowledgment that Truss’s initial cabinet was from too narrow a section of the party, Hands had, crucially, met with the prime minister to give “constructive” feedback in private, rather than speak in the media: “Team Truss is trying to show that … there is a way back for all MPs so long as they approach it the right way.” In other words, Katy said: “They’re saying to MPs: voice your concerns with us, just don’t do what Michael Gove did.”
Bringing forward the fiscal statement is also a concession – and there was a remarkable U-turn on the identity of the new Treasury secretary, with old hand James Bowler appointed instead of the widely reported favourite Antonia Romeo, who had no Treasury experience. “All of that plays into the message No 10 is sending that Truss is in listening mode,” Katy said. “They have acknowledged that they’ve had to calibrate their position.”
Ultimately, Truss is in a position of limited power
Which is a funny thing to say about a prime minister with a large parliamentary majority. And yet: even if MPs are reluctant to act, and even if the concessions are helpful, Truss and Kwarteng have painted themselves so far into the corner that it will take more than a conciliatory ministerial pick to get them out. “She is still in an extremely difficult position,” Katy said. “She needs to calm the markets – but anything that does that is going to be politically difficult.”
The polling suggests that her claim to be fine with being unpopular is about to come under the most severe, and most practical, kind of test. “There are loads of tricky positions on supply-side reform that she’s going to need ministers to defend, but are they going to be willing to do that if they don’t think she’s going to be around for that long? It’s fine to say you’re OK with being unpopular, and to say that it will pay off in the long term, but the bottom line is that if you’re doing badly in the polls, you lose political capital – and it’s much harder to bring people into line.”
At prime ministers’ questions today, Truss will make her first substantial appearance since the relatively controlled environment of party conference – and we may get a sense of how close all of this is to boiling over. “PMQs is important for morale,” Katy said. “At the moment, I think more MPs than not want to try to make this work and give her a chance. This will give us a flavour of whether that’s plausible.”
