Liz Truss is not the first Conservative prime minister to see her carefully cultivated self-image quickly clash with political reality. Boris Johnson was the prime minister who compared himself to the reckless mayor in Jaws who kept the beaches open despite shark attacks – but then had to order the British population to lock themselves up at home during the Covid pandemic.
David Cameron initially sought to compete with Labour on entering office by pledging increased expenditure on education and the NHS – but then oversaw brutal austerity cuts that pared back public services to the bone. And on Thursday, Liz Truss, who has spent the summer promulgating the economic benefits of the small state, will announce one of the biggest government handouts in generations, topped only by the Covid response of up to £400bn, in her first week in office. The new prime minister is regularly described as the most ideological in a generation, making no secret of her desire to emulate Margaret Thatcher through fiscal discipline, attacks on the unions, culture wars and a variety of outfits featuring fur hats and pussy-bow blouses. She rejected calls from all wings of her deeply divided party to appoint a unity cabinet, surrounding herself with loyalists like Kwasi Kwarteng, Thérèse Coffey and James Cleverly and bringing on board rightwingers including Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg. While her team protest that she has handed out roles to some of her original leadership rivals, she conducted a brutal clear-out of every senior Rishi Sunak backer. Just a peppering of more minor roles were offered to his allies. Her first international calls were to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who she reassured that Britain would remain a staunch ally and discussed the need to strengthen global security, and to US president Joe Biden, with the pair – although never likely to emulate Thatcher and Reagan’s close bond – reflecting on the special relationship and the shared values of freedom and democracy. And at her first prime minister’s questions clash with Keir Starmer on Wednesday, the domestic political dividing lines were drawn as the Labour leader attacked her on “the Tory fantasy of trickle-down economics”, establishing clear policy differences on a windfall tax on energy firms and cuts to corporation tax. But despite all that, she will turn up in the House of Commons on Thursday to announce a massive public spending package that would be applauded by statists and goes against all of the instincts of her neoliberal free-marketeer clique. What her announcement shows us is that even the most ideologically rigid politicians have to be willing to defer to pragmatism when faced with the harsh, cold realities of government – in this case the cost of living crisis and the prospect of millions of families struggling to pay their bills this winter. Truss will be aware that the energy emergency is the single biggest issue facing her government, and if she gets the strategy to deal with it wrong – when so many in her party were arguing for a different approach – her days in No 10 will almost certainly be numbered, either by yet another brutal putsch or at the next general election. That she is willing to go from rejecting “handouts” to announcing a huge one of her own – believed to be costing somewhere in the region of £130bn – hints at a political dexterity that not many, including in her own party, have credited her for. But they shouldn’t be too surprised, as Truss, who U-turned during her leadership campaign over regional pay boards, has a long history of taking firm policy positions and then backtracking, whether it was suggesting steel tariffs when trade secretary or campaigning for Remain before becoming a fervent Brexiter. Those who have worked with her insist that she has always been a logical thinker, focusing on practical solutions to problems across the various Whitehall departments she has led. The tensions between her ideological vision and the need to be flexible look likely to continue.