Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the only conservative in the room by Liz Truss
This book is more valuable than one would think from the derision which has been poured on it. Lessons can be learned from it about the difficulties not only of being Prime Minister, but of being a conservative.
The troubles which beset Liz Truss during her 49 days in Downing Street can be traced to her assumptions about what it means to be a conservative (or indeed a Conservative). On page 14 she writes:
“Politics is ideological – you either believe in big government running everything or you don’t; you either believe in low taxes stimulating economic growth or you don’t. In order to mount a sustained campaign to fix the problems that need fixing, there has to be a unifying ideology around which a party can rally and for which it can fight.”
In his brilliant essay Rationalism in Politics, published in 1947, Michael Oakeshott sought to explode the idea that there are short cuts to a political education: that instead of immersing oneself in a tradition, one can avail oneself of an ideology which will tell one what to do, and which, as long as one follows it with the utmost fidelity, will solve one’s problems.
This is how Truss sees politics. She sees the defects of her opponents’ ideology. In a chapter about the environment she writes:
“In our haste to not be seen as on the wrong side of history, we failed to make conservative arguments for environmental improvement – arguments centred on property rights, individual and family endeavours and the free market. Instead, we empowered our ideological opponents and accepted much of their extremist agenda. The environmental movement is fundamentally driven by the radical left. I know who these people are. I literally grew up with them. My parents were members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1980s and had friends who were in the Ecology Party, an early iteration of the Green Party.”
Conservatives will approve her defence of property rights, and of the family, but the trouble with Truss is that she supposes the answer to a false ideology to be a true ideology.
She craves certainty, yearns to convince herself that she has found the answer, and is inclined to treat as an enemy anyone who is not as confident as she is that now is the moment to cut taxes.
In the title of her book she describes herself as “the only conservative in the room”, and in the text she writes “I was in a minority of one yet again”.
This might have meant she had a commendable willingness to have the necessary argument about policy, but more often it seems to have meant that she adopted an “I know best” attitude, avoided having the argument, and instead adopted a scornful and defiant attitude to those who did not share her beliefs.
When reviewing Out of the Blue: The inside story of the rise and rapid fall of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and James Heale, published a month after her resignation as Prime Minister on 25th October 2022, I found myself writing:
“She was not an easy person to contradict, and on the whole she surrounded herself with aides who did not contradict her. The case against whatever she thought was a good idea was seldom made.”
Her own account of her career bears this out. She proceeds at breakneck speed from a junior ministerial post at Education through Cabinet posts at Environment, Justice, the Treasury, Trade and the Foreign Office, to her seven weeks as Prime Minister.
In every post she holds, Truss is convinced she knows best, writes with anger and disdain about the many officials and Conservatives who disagree with her, but is seldom found going to see those people, or inviting them to come and see her, so she can persuade them they are in error, or can discover that on this occasion she is in error, or can at least arrive at what in these regrettable circumstances, including grave differences of opinion within the Conservative Party, is the best possible compromise.
She instead indulges in criticism from afar. So, one may note in passing, do book reviewers. What a preposterous pretence of superior knowledge those scribblers make.
But the scribblers are not, fortunately, in the running to become Prime Minister. She soon was, for her message that it was all someone else’s fault had a powerful appeal to the Conservative Party members who on 5th September 2022 were found to have decided, by 81,326 votes for Truss to 60,399 for Rishi Sunak, to make her Prime Minister in succession to Boris Johnson.
Truss with commendable honesty admits she was “underprepared” for the prime ministership. She goes on:
“What I really lacked was any kind of political infrastructure that could help me deliver the radical, transformative programme Britain needed. This was partly because the British system tends to underfund and shut out political expertise; the people who shared my beliefs generally did not have government experience or understand how the system operates.”
Successful Prime Ministers are capable of persuading people that what they and their colleagues are doing makes sense and deserves support. This Truss could not do. Her few parliamentary performances after Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget triggered a run on the pound and a pensions crisis were singularly feeble.
Kwarteng’s measures were by her account discussed with virtually no one before they were sprung upon an astonished world. She went for a walk with Simon Clarke at Chevening, Jacob Rees-Mogg was also involved, but there was almost no time, and worse still no inclination, as there would have been under a more substantial figure, to hammer out the pros and cons of what was to be done, a process which obliges one to discover which arguments pass muster, and which are useless.
It was not enough for Truss to declare over and over again that she did not believe in big government, and that the nation was being rendered uncompetitive by the excessive size of the state. She and Kwarteng had to give some indication of how they were going to start moving towards small government, i.e. what spending cuts they were going to make.
What does the state do now which it ought not to be doing? No one has yet cracked this very difficult problem. It was not, unfortunately, sufficient to say that tax cuts would lead to growth, so all would be well.
The Office for Budget Responsibility, the Treasury and the Bank of England all found fault with her proposals. She in turn finds fault with them, especially the OBR, with the “hideous hell” of its forecasting process.
She accuses these “technocrats” of “an almost contemptuous disregard for party politics and the popular will”, but she herself says that the Brexit referendum had “normalised infighting” within “a fractious and febrile Conservative parliamentary party”, fewer than a third of whom voted for her, and virtually none of whom backed her to the bitter end.
She says rather plaintively that no one warned her of the problems which lay ahead. But she had indicated that she did not wish to be warned, and her ideology told her that tax cuts were a good thing, for they would lead to growth.
Once the argument about unfunded tax cuts was forced upon her, she found herself unable to persuade her own troops that she had done the right thing. Nor did other authoritative figures come to her aid:
“A senior journalist has since told me that part of the problem we faced was a distinct shortage of expert voices supporting our agenda. Broadcasters and press alike struggled to find economists and commentators who could explain what we were trying to do.”
“With words we govern men,” Disraeli wrote in one of his early novels, Contarini Fleming, published in 1832, and he, however precarious his position, could always find the words, and at length become one of the greatest of all Conservatives, and the only one to be honoured with a posthumous cult.
Truss could not find the words, nor did she realise until it was too late that she needed the words, nor will she be honoured with a posthumous cult.
The post Truss shows in her book how fatal an ideology can be to a conservative appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Andrew Gimson
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