It is perhaps fair to say that Tory MPs have mixed feelings about removing Boris Johnson. The parliamentary party moved decisively against him, only to spend weeks mourning the departure of a man who won them an 80-seat majority. Now some fear that it is about to be replaced by the Johnson Mark 2, but one that shares only its negative characteristics.
Although Liz Truss has improved as an activist since she began her leadership career, not even her die-hard fans would put her on par with Johnson, the unlikely fusion of bewildered bonhomie, deviance through humor and big-state populism helped secure victory in 2019.
Truss’s appeal to Tory members is based on a very different combination of low-tax orthodoxy and the promise of an “outspoken Yorkshirewoman” who knows exactly what she wants. Her approach to work would certainly be very different, with former colleagues of the Foreign Secretary agreeing that she is fiercely hardworking and disciplined.
But the longer the contest has dragged on, the more observers have noted tendencies within the Truss team to replicate defining elements of Johnson’s No.10, in particular a rush for new policies, often borrowed from others or invented on the hoof, that then they must be done. amended or abandoned amid strong denials of a U-turn.
Truss plays pool during a visit to a youth facility in Chelmsford this week. Photograph: Getty Images
In part, this is a factor in a leadership race in which candidates must woo a small number of members of the notoriously right-leaning Conservative party, while not making too many commitments, in terms of politics, as they enter Downing Street.
Hence the confused scenes this week as Truss insisted that help with rising energy bills would be based on tax cuts, while his allies quietly stressed that they could be other aid and his campaign team tried vehemently to deny any contradiction between the two competing narratives.
A more striking example was last week, when Truss hastily launched an announced plan to save £11bn a year with a “war on Whitehall waste”, copied from a proposal by the Taxpayers’ Alliance of the right, in which most of the savings would have come to limit or reduce public sector wages outside London and the South East.
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This was particularly reminiscent of the last period of conflict in Johnson’s first government, where apparently half-baked policies such as a return to imperial measures were paraded in the press, largely mocked and then forgotten.
In a more alarming facsimile of Johnson’s operation, the Truss campaign tried to cover up the maneuver by falsely accusing the media of “deliberate misrepresentation” of a plan it had openly stated its intention in a press release.
While Johnson is a former newspaper columnist who likes to claim camaraderie with reporters, his No. 10 operation has misled reporters several times, with its allies regularly chastising an allegedly biased media outlet. In an exploitative event this week, Truss mimicked that part of Johnson’s playbook, saying journalists were trying to “talk to our country”.
Truss has also shown a Johnson-like tendency to be vague or even inaccurate about the facts to suit his political purposes, notably his regularly told and widely debunked backstory about how the comprehensive school in the which he attended Leeds was a failed school.
In another exploitative event this week, in Cheltenham on Thursday, Truss repeated his concern about a disproportionate number of women being jailed for failing to pay the TV license fee, something fact-checking groups have said which does not appear to be supported by the evidence.
Another similarity has come in Truss’ avoidance of excessive scrutiny during the contest. Johnson dodged a BBC grilling by Andrew Neil, backed by his rivals, while Truss has turned down the corporation’s offer of an interview with Nick Robinson, unlike Rishi Sunak, his opponent.
Of course, as any Labor member who voted for Keir Starmer on promises to follow a broadly Corbynite political platform will know, leadership races and leading a party, let alone the country, are different things. But Truss’ rivals, at least, argue there is a sense of continuity.
“She really is BoJo’s heir,” a source supporting Sunak said. “His team cuts and pastes politics, puts something in black and white, claims it’s been misinterpreted, and gets Brandon [Lewis, a key ally of Johnson and now Truss] go poop the next day.”