The final moments of a convoluted and chaotic 24 hours of political drama that culminated in Liz Truss’s downfall began at about 11.40am on Thursday, when Sir Graham Brady slipped into Downing Street via a back entrance. The official No 10 narrative was that Truss had instigated the meeting with Brady, the shop steward for backbench Conservative MPs. Few believe that, and even if it was the case, the power balance was much like a bankrupt calling in the administrator as the inevitable loomed. While the precise details of what Brady told Truss remain opaque, the message was obvious: you have lost the confidence of too many MPs, the chair of the 1922 Committee told her, and if you do not go voluntarily you will be removed. From that moment on, events travelled at speed, with every development increasing the expectation that the UK was heading towards a fifth Conservative prime minister since 2016. Shortly before 12.30pm, Thérèse Coffey – Truss’s health secretary, deputy prime minister and close friend – was photographed arriving at No 10. Minutes later, Jake Berry, the Tory party chair, was seen walking, grim-faced and with a phone clamped to his ear, into Downing Street. Less than an hour later black-uniformed staff carried a lectern outside No 10, and the game was up. Dressed in a royal blue suit, the gloomy expression of recent days supplanted by an uncomfortable half-smile, Truss delivered a statement of just 200 words. She had spoken to the King. A successor would be chosen within a week. She was gone.
Even in the context of the almost absurdly accelerated timescale of Truss’s premiership, how did she and the Conservative party get here given that, just the day before, the main challenge was initially seen as coping with prime minister’s questions? As with much of the last 45 days, the answer comes down to a small amount of bad luck which is grossly magnified thanks to a toxic combination of cloth-eared party management, ideological tunnel vision and an often astounding tendency towards sheer ineptitude. The condensed endgame had begun at 4am on Wednesday when Suella Braverman, still then the home secretary, joined the National Crime Agency on a raid in Oxfordshire connected to illicit Channel crossings. As she returned from the raid in the back of a ministerial car, a presumably sleep-deprived Braverman used her personal email to send a government document about immigration to a supportive Tory backbencher, accidentally copying in the aide of another MP, who informed the whips about what was a serious, if not necessarily career-ending, rule breach. The result is well documented. Truss called in her home secretary, and after what some reports later described as a standup row, Braverman agreed to resign, albeit with a departure letter dripping with barely coded contempt for the prime minister. One of the many paradoxes of a truly extraordinary day was that Truss could, even then, probably have survived the loss of a second top minister in five days, at least in the short term. Yes, many MPs on the right of the Tory party assumed Braverman had been toppled by Jeremy Hunt, who replaced Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor on Friday, but the swift installation of Grant Shapps as home secretary signalled an intent to steady the ship.
Similarly, such had been the endless news wattage of Truss’s administration that the suspension earlier on Wednesday of one of her senior aides, Jason Stein, for alleged negative briefings had passed with relatively little notice. What proved Truss’s final undoing was, instead, a sequence of events which underlined perhaps her most serious flaw as PM: the tendency to appoint loyalists, cronies and friends to top jobs, irrespective of their apparent abilities. The challenge facing Wendy Morton, appointed chief whip after enthusiastically backing Truss’s leadership bid, had been dealing with a Labour motion in the Commons which sought to split Tory MPs by offering them the chance of a vote to effectively outlaw fracking. The first clear error by Morton and her team was to declare on Wednesday morning that this would be a confidence issue, with MPs who failed to back the government at risk of losing the whip. From this point events rapidly deteriorated, passing through confusion, then chaos and into outright farce. After a string of Tories pledged to rebel nonetheless, a minister stood up in the Commons to say it was not a confidence vote. As MPs lined up to vote, many simply did not know. At least one was in tears. At various points in the ensuing melee, Morton and her allies badgered or shouted at confused would-be rebels, or according to some reports, physically shoved them into the government lobby. Morton and her deputy, Craig Whittaker, were widely assumed to have resigned amid the bedlam, until a seven-word No 10 statement at 9.50pm said they had not. At precisely 1.33am, another Downing Street missive said the vote was a confidence issue after all, leading some rebel MPs to publicly question whether they remained Conservative MPs or not. And all this, it must be remembered, was for a fairly routine if procedurally knotty opposition day motion, one the government ended up winning by a significant margin.
Drinking and gossiping in Strangers’ Bar on Wednesday evening, and by WhatsApp the next day, Tory MPs were in despair at the extent of unforced errors. One cabinet minister openly blamed Morton for causing the PM’s downfall, albeit with the full complicity of No 10. “Yesterday was appalling mismanagement,” they lamented. “It was a victory with a majority of 96. If the chief whip had not lost the plot over it we would not be in this situation. Confident leaders would have just ignored games by the opposition.” Another MP was more blunt still: “The whips lied and misled MPs to achieve an outcome on house business. The public deserves answers.” Hours later, Truss was gone, but there was a sense among many Conservatives that the party’s troubles are only just beginning as it embarks on what could well be an utterly brutal rapid-fire race to discover who will inherit Truss’s policy poison chalice of spooked markets, spending cuts and endless broken promises. “There is no way the party will be able to agree on one candidate,” one MP said. “We are too far gone.” For some Tories, worse still was to come: the news that Boris Johnson might join the race. One MP was clear: “If he came back I would immediately defect to the Labour party.” There is, it would seem, much more still to come.