The Truss issue

She did it, and is in place, and with a new Cabinet team. It will take more than a mop and bucket to clear the blood on the carpet: gallons of it.

It is looking good so far – a pause to the Online Safety Bill and the Bill of Rights Bill; both measures robustly criticised here. (Both Truss and Sunak attacked Nadine Dorries’s Online Safety Bill in their leadership debates, so her resignation was not unexpected.) In the Commons, the nervy Paisley schoolgirl was gone, and we saw a confident performance, with no mention of cheese or pork markets.

When her predecessor stepped at into office, I wrote a post (“Boris the chosen one”) with a number of  observations, including the tribute he received from Toby Young, another journalist and achiever, who had headlined his piece “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man”, and the same quote appeared, with one necessary change, about Liz Truss in the Mail yesterday.

I also wrote and a list of predictions, which were all borne out in time.  I can repeat much of that here about Mrs O’Leary:

Some things we can be pretty sure of:

  1. She will surprise her opponents;
  2. She will disappoint and frustrate her supporters;
  3. A great many MPs will be drawn from the backbenches to fill the shoes of those who cannot hack it;
  4. The coming men will themselves surprise their enemies and disappoint and frustrate their supporters;
  5. Someone will start a cry of ‘betrayal’.

When there is a change at the top, political commentators will project all their own hopes and fears on the new PM and declare in all solemnity that there is only one way to go on X, Y or Z, and claim to understand exactly what is in the mind of the new PM, which is surprisingly exactly what is in the commentator’s own mind, and they will be shocked, and convinced of an establishment plot, when it does not turn out so.

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Author: AlexanderTheHog

A humble scribbler who out of my lean and low ability will lend something to Master Hobbes