Calls to Oust Truss from Tory MP, ‘Game is up’
Newslooks- LONDON (AP)
When Liz Truss was running to lead Britain this summer, an ally predicted her first weeks in office would be turbulent. But few were prepared for the scale of the sound and fury least of all Truss herself. In just six weeks, the prime minister’s libertarian economic policies have triggered a financial crisis, emergency central bank intervention, multiple U-turns and the firing of her Treasury chief. Now Truss faces a mutiny inside the governing Conservative Party that leaves her leadership hanging by a thread.
Conservative lawmaker Robert Halfon fumed on Sunday that the last few weeks had brought “one horror story after another.” “The government has looked like libertarian jihadists and treated the whole country as kind of laboratory mice on which to carry out ultra, ultra free-market experiments,” he told Sky News.
Conservative MPs have started to publicly call for Liz Truss to go as they do not believe she can survive the current political and economic crisis.
Crispin Blunt, former chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, was the first Tory MP to put his head above the parapet since Kwasi Kwarteng was sacked as chancellor on Friday. He said “the game is up” for Ms Truss after just six weeks as prime minister as he does not believe she can survive the current crisis, which has seen weeks of economic turmoil after the mini-budget. “I think the game is up and it’s now a question as to how the succession is managed,” he told Channel 4’s Andrew Neil Show.
Asked how the party will get rid of her, the MP, who is standing down at the next election, said: “If there is such a weight of opinion in the parliamentary party that we have to have a change, then it will be effected.
“Exactly how it is done and exactly under what mechanism… but it will happen.”
Under current Conservative Party rules, a confidence vote in a leader cannot take place until they have been in power for at least a year, so she is theoretically safe until next September.
However, there has been talk among MPs of the powerful 1922 backbench committee of Tory MPs of changing the rules to reduce that buffer period.
If enough MPs submit no confidence letters in the PM, then the 1922 executive may have little choice but to change them.
Truss ‘unlikely to be in No 10 at Christmas’
Andrew Mitchell, who ran new chancellor Jeremy Hunt‘s leadership campaign, told the BBC if Ms Truss “cannot do the job, I’m afraid that she will go”.
Former Chancellor George Osborne said Ms Truss is unlikely to still be in Downing Street by Christmas.
He called her a “PINO – prime minister in name only” and said Ms Truss is “hiding in Number 10” as pressure mounts.
Asked if she can survive, he told the Andrew Neil Show: “Probably not.”
And Mark Garnier, Conservative MP for Wyre Forest, today questioned Ms Truss’s position but stayed clear of outright calling for her to go.
He said those who agree with her appointing Mr Hunt as chancellor are split into two camps – those who believe MPs should give Ms Truss time, and those who want to “rip the plaster off”.
“I think power is a very fickle thing, and I think Liz Truss is in office but is not in power,” he told BBC Politics Midlands.
“The question is, do we give her a chance or do we rip the plaster off?
“The really important question is do we feel confident that we should be going into the next general election with Liz Truss? If we don’t, I think we need to rip the plaster off.” It’s not as if the party wasn’t warned. During the summertime contest to lead the Conservatives, Truss called herself a disruptor who would challenge economic “orthodoxy.” She promised she would cut taxes and slash red tape, and would spur Britain’s sluggish economy to grow.
Her rival, former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak, argued that immediate tax cuts would be reckless amid the economic shockwaves from the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Party needs a fundamental reset
Alicia Kearns, the new chairwoman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said the party needed a “fundamental reset” but said it was difficult to know if Ms Truss should go. “Ultimately it is a very difficult one because I think you know we’ve had the questions around our moral competency,” she told Times Radio. “We’ve now got questions around our fiscal competency. “I don’t want further questions around even our ability to continue to govern as a party and our ability to stay united. It’s an incredibly difficult one, and ultimately I need to listen to colleagues and speak to colleagues over coming days. “But do we need a fundamental reset? Without question.”
Tory grandee and pollster Lord Hayward told Sky News it is going to be “very difficult” for Ms Truss to remain as PM after the past few weeks and a new chancellor after just 38 days.
On Sunday morning, both Mr Hunt and Andrew Griffith, financial secretary to the Treasury, said they think Ms Truss will remain as they showed their loyalty to the PM.
The 172,000 Conservative Party members -– who are largely older and affluent — preferred Truss’ boosterish vision. She won 57% of members’ votes to become leader of the governing party on Sept. 5. The next day, she was appointed prime minister by Queen Elizabeth II in one of the monarch’s final acts before her death on Sept. 8.
Truss’ first days in office were overshadowed by a period of national mourning for the queen. Then on Sept. 23, Treasury chief Kwasi Kwarteng announced the economic plan he and Truss had drawn up. It included 45 billion pounds ($50 billion) in tax cuts -– including an income tax reduction for the highest earners — without an accompanying assessment of how the government would pay for them.
Truss was doing what she and allies said she would. Libertarian think-tank chief Mark Littlewood predicted during the summer there would be “fireworks” as the new prime minister pushed for economic reform at “absolutely breakneck speed.”
Still, the scale of the announcement took financial markets, and political experts, by surprise.
“Many of us, wrongly, expected her to pivot after she won the leadership contest in the way many presidents do after winning the primaries,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “But she didn’t do that. She actually meant what she said.”
The pound plunged to a record low against the U.S. dollar and the cost of government borrowing soared. The Bank of England was forced to step in to buy government bonds and prevent the financial crisis from spreading to the wider economy. The central bank also warned that interest rates will have to rise even faster than expected to curb inflation that is running at around 10%, leaving millions of homeowners facing big increases in mortgage payments.
Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government think tank, said Truss and Kwarteng made a series of “unforced errors” with their economic package.
“They shouldn’t have made their contempt for economic institutions quite so clear,” she said. “I think they could have listened to advice. And I think one of the things that they got very wrong was to announce one part of the package, the tax cuts … without the spending side of the equation.”
As the negative reaction grew, Truss began to abandon bits of the package in a bid to reassure her party and the markets. The tax cut for top earners was ditched in the middle of the Conservative Party’s annual conference in early October as the party rebelled.
It wasn’t enough. On Friday, Truss fired Kwarteng and replaced her longtime friend and ally with Jeremy Hunt, who served as health secretary and foreign secretary in the Conservative governments of David Cameron and Theresa May.
At a brief, downbeat news conference, the prime minister acknowledged that “parts of our mini budget went further and faster than markets were expecting.” She reversed a planned cut in corporation tax, another pillar of her economic plan, to “reassure the markets of our fiscal discipline.”
Truss is still prime minister in name, but power in government has shifted to Hunt, who has signaled he plans to rip up much of her remaining economic plan when he makes a medium-term budget statement on Oct. 31. He has said tax increases and public spending cuts will be needed to restore the government’s fiscal credibility.
Still, Hunt insisted Sunday: “The prime minister’s in charge.”
“She’s listened. She’s changed. She’s been willing to do that most difficult thing in politics, which is to change tack,” Hunt told the BBC.
President Joe Biden on Saturday called embattled British Prime Minister Liz Truss’ abandoned tax cut plan a “mistake,” and said he is worried that other nations’ fiscal policies may hurt the U.S. amid “worldwide inflation.”
Biden said it was “predictable” that the new prime minister on Friday was forced to walk back plans to aggressively cut taxes without identifying cost savings, after Truss’ proposal caused turmoil in global financial markets. It marked an unusual criticism by a U.S. president of the domestic policy decisions of one of its closest allies.
“I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,” Biden said. “I disagree with the policy, but that’s up to Great Britain.”
The Conservative Party still commands a large majority in Parliament, and -– in theory -– has two years until a national election must be held. Polls suggest an election would be a wipeout for the Tories, with the Labour Party winning a big majority.
Conservative lawmakers are agonizing about whether to try to replace their leader for a second time this year. In July, the party forced out Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who led them to victory in 2019, when serial ethics scandals ensnared his administration. Now many of them have buyer’s remorse about his replacement. Under party rules, Truss is safe from a leadership challenge for a year, but some Conservative legislators believe she can be forced to resign if the party can agree on a successor. Defeated rival Sunak, House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt and popular Defense Secretary Ben Wallace are among the names being mentioned as potential replacements. Johnson, who remains a lawmaker, still has supporters, too.
Junior Treasury minister Andrew Griffith argued Sunday that Truss should be given a chance to try to restore order.
“This is a time when we need stability,” he told Sky News. “People at home are just tearing their hair out at the level of uncertainty. What they want to see is a competent government getting on with (the) job.”
