Britain’s zombie prime minister will be lucky to make it to the year’s end. But she is simply a symptom of the Conservative Party’s wider malaise.
| In 1926, the celebrated whodunnit author Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days. A new biography suggests that she went into a “fugue state”, where she temporarily forgot who she was and even assumed a new identity.
Truss unwisely rushed out a mini-budget that was half-baked, in a bid to look decisive. She tried to make recklessness look like resolve, but then she crumbled as reality turned her crash-through economic strategy into a total crash.On Friday, she sacked her closest political ally, ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, simply for the sin of carrying out her will. Markets, the media and her colleagues were unimpressed – the buck self-evidently stops with her.
Hunt will try to steady the ship, and may give her some breathing space. But even if he delivers a sound fiscal statement on October 31 that markets can abide, it is hard to see her slipping free of the political chokehold she is in. But if he is as wily a politician as his long feat of survival suggests, he will also use his elevation to prepare the ground for a tilt at the leadership, denied to him by defeat to Johnson in the Tory contest of mid-2019.Making his task easier, his two objectives – party stability and personal advancement – may well fuse.
But Hunt’s advantage is that their copybooks are equally blotted by Truss’ missteps, and they do not have a clearly untainted and credible candidate. If Tory party members and MPs give their new leader licence to ditch the ideological blinkers of “Trussonomics”, he or she could yet find a way to win.The Labour Party, after all, is still recovering from its own protracted struggles with extremism and disunity. And the next election does not need to take place until the end of 2024.
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