, was forced out over Brexit’s implementation; and her successor, Boris Johnson, resigned after numerous scandals. Truss then defeated Sunak in a Conservative Party leadership election. But after Truss and her right-wing Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a plan for major tax cuts, financial markets cratered, and Truss quickly lost the support of her party as her approval ratings fell to ten percent.
In terms of whether it stabilizes, I think it will, not least because it’s really unclear what the Conservatives could do next other than hold a general election, and they’re not going to want to hold a general election in such circumstances. I think that Rishi Sunak will be pretty unpopular. But, at the same time, he will tick certain boxes for the parliamentary Conservative Party. He will be much less chaotic than Boris Johnson, and he’ll be much less dogmatic than Liz Truss.
The perception was that Boris Johnson’s political skill, his ability to win the 2019 election, and, for a while, his popularity were based around his appeal to many former Labour voters in the North. It was a combination of his Leave stance and a broader willingness to spend money than others in the Tory Party.
Why did Liz Truss’s premiership explode? Was it more about the markets reacting the way they did, or something about her communication style, or just the extreme nature of her tax plan? How do you understand the speed of it? It’s pretty shocking. This is quite a puzzle. In the spring, I asked someone who’s much better connected to the parliamentary Conservative Party than I am about the possibility of Liz Truss being its next leader. He said there wasn’t a chance. I’ve thought about this quite a few times, obviously, over this summer. I’m not really convinced that there was an ideological shift within the parliamentary Conservative Party in the direction that Truss wanted to take them.
There were aspects of this that did concern me. When Jeremy Hunt, Truss’s second Chancellor, basically undid his predecessor’s budget, I think it’s notable that he didn’t just undo the tax changes. He made pretty significant changes to the energy commitments that Kwarteng had made, which was basically to provide support for two years to households for energy bills. That was reduced to six months, a pretty significant change in policy.
Where gas is concerned, next winter is going to be even harder than this winter for European countries. Unless something changes, Britain’s going to be going into the second half of next year with households not having their energy bills protected. An awful lot of the politics of energy and energy-driven inflation have yet to play out.
Maybe they have been in power too long.
Requiring the prime minister to be from the unpopular party seems to be the British way.
While pretending the climate emergency doesnt exist, and pretending obscene profit taking at the corporate level is not contributing to that cost-of-living situation. HeDoesntAnswerToYou