The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so it’s no surprise that Liz Truss is ahead in the race to be our next Prime Minister. She’s driving all the right people crazy, and her increasingly unhinged disdain is proving her best recruiting sergeant among a Tory affiliate desperate to sway him to the left.
His critics don’t understand his appeal and are showing all the classic signs of a delusional ruling class that no longer likes or understands half the country. The Twitter mob is already showing all the symptoms of truss upset syndrome, as even a cursory scroll through the rants of our cultural elites immediately reveals.
Like the allergic response that caused Brexit, TDS is an absurdly irrational overreaction caused by the same category of people who wanted us to stay in the EU whenever they see or hear the Foreign Secretary, and especially when he announces a free market policy that would alter the status quo. They recoil in disgust, obsess over his supposedly clumsy mannerisms, reject everything he says out of hand, and catastrophize even his most modest proposals.
There were several stages to the emergence of TDS. First, when it became clear that Truss was emerging as favourite, the reaction was one of bewilderment, hilarity and joy – those stupid Tories have really done it this time, handing the election to Labour! Then, when he started to make his bid, there was huge support for Rishi Sunak from people who would never dream of voting Tory.
Now we are in the third stage, with rage, fury and extreme and disproportionate rage at his rashness, his audacity, his unorthodox positions, combined with almost astonishing levels of complacency: how dare he ask for more grammar schools or an improvement? mandate for the Bank of England? How stupid! Doesn’t he know that smart people have already researched and dismissed it? The electorate will hate these ideas, won’t they? won’t it be like that?
No doubt there will be an even uglier and nastier fourth stage, which will be triggered if and when it starts to outperform Labor in the polls, and especially if it is able to break through the 40 per cent support threshold. This will be met with all-out war and a hysterical, endless commitment to annihilate it, reminiscent of the scorched earth campaign that accompanied the Brexit battles in the dying days of the May government.
The truth will no longer matter: it will be about the ends justifying the means to stop Truss at all costs. Everything he says will be criticized by intellectuals, academics, lobbyists and left-wing commentators; every minor mishap magnified; every non-leftist idea represented as monstrously unfair. If she stands firm in Northern Ireland, right-thinking people will side with Brussels.
TDS is closely related to a number of strange emotional pathologies to which the British centre-left has succumbed. Behind the boosters versus doomsters debate – the argument between those who believe better policies can rescue Britain’s lethargic economy and those who fear little can realistically be done – is a feeling among some of the latter that Britain is not deserves to succeed. We must be punished: we voted for Brexit and then Boris, and so failure is our just desert. This is why we are told that raising corporate tax would not change our competitiveness, although of course it would be supposedly demagogic to cut taxes to attract capital.
Then there’s the closely related Candide Fallacy, after Voltaire’s satirical novel: the idiotic idea, first aired by Treasury Remainers in 2016, that everything is already for the best in this best of possible worlds Taxation is fine, regulation, the civil service, as is the NHS – indeed, some even insist, deregulation would be a disaster as it would rob business of the stability it needs. Only rejoining the single market, ostensibly the only possible driver of growth, would make any difference: all other reforms are irrelevant, or so this flawed argument goes. His supporters fail to realize the levels of public anger with our economic and social performance, with the state of Britain, and therefore risk fatally underestimating the appeal of a “candidate for change”.
Last but not least, our progressive and egalitarian elites in London make an exception when it comes to right-wing Tory women: the over-the-top nature of some of the attacks on Truss are clearly motivated in part by despicable misogyny. with anti-Northern snobbery. Even Johnson was not treated with so much contempt, so much derision, so much nonsense.
The challenges facing a PM Truss would be immense. Completely separate from the rants of TDS fanatics, it is legitimate to question whether she could muster the operational and management skills needed to turn around a sinking supertanker. The next Prime Minister must make an urgent and radical change in institutions as well as in policies: smart public relations will be only a small part of it. The strange setback of his campaign on regional payment boards, a good and necessary idea, was not promising. Extreme discipline, resilience and focus will be required, as well as the ability to hire great advisors. Dozens of new policies will be needed to boost growth and productivity.
I’ve known Truss since 2008 and I’m cautiously optimistic. Comparisons to the Iron Lady may be inappropriate, but there is an illuminating historical parallel. Many dismissed Margaret Thatcher in the early 1970s; as education secretary, her opposition to comprehensiveness was disappointingly mild. He assured that it was no longer mandatory for councils to convert all schools to comprehensives, but this only slowed the massacre. She did not defeat the Blob, and only saved 94 grammar schools, allowing hundreds to be vandalized. He wasted too much political capital by ending free school milk, a small cost-cutting measure.
A similar performance today would have seen centre-right critics writing Thatcher off in despair. Few would have predicted how much she would grow into the role, and Truss’ supporters hope she too will become a formidable leader. His critics, blinded by Truss derangement syndrome, do not even conceive of the possibility that this is correct. They will rue the day they underestimated her so completely.