The disastrous tenure of Boris Johnson as British prime minister is to be followed by one that threatens to be even worse. At a time when Britain desperately needs political stability to address crises at home and abroad, Liz Truss will instead prolong the sense of chaos that has hung over her party and her country since the Brexit referendum in 2016.
Johnson’s period in power was an abject humiliation. It was also profoundly damaging to Britain’s interests, making it poorer and less relevant in the world. That was in nobody’s interest, least of all Ireland, which has watched the rapid unwinding of post-1998 Anglo-Irish relations with a mixture of sadness and incredulity.
What Britain needed was a clean break. Instead, it will be led by someone who offered herself as the continuity candidate and is now indebted to the wilder fringes of her party. Truss may lack Johnson’s charisma, but she shares his opportunism, his gift for self-promotion, his bluster and his refusal to engage with the trade-offs of modern government. Economically she faces huge problems which a simple promise to cut taxes will not solve; retaining the confidence of Britain’s lenders may in itself be a challenge. She appears genuinely to believe that the keys to fixing Britain’s chronic regional inequalities are deregulation and a smaller state. She has mocked environmental regulation, positioned herself as a culture warrior and pandered to her hardline supporters by pledging unilateral repudiation of the Northern Ireland protocol.
It is tragic that the best hope for Britain is that Truss believes none of what she says. Her opinions are certainly susceptible to change. She was once a left-wing Liberal Democrat who believed the monarchy should be abolished. Under David Cameron she was a convinced Remainer. When power in the party shifted to the right and it became politically expedient to change her view, she promptly did so, embracing a hard exit with the zeal of a convert. A prime minister who cannot even see how Brexit has damaged the UK has no chance of mitigating that damage.
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Truss’s ability to alienate London’s friends if anything exceeds that of her predecessor. Last week, by which time she was already assured of victory in the leadership contest, she needlessly insulted France by refusing to say whether that country was “a friend or foe”. At a stage in her campaign when most politicians would be edging back towards the centre, she was still ramping up the reactionary rhetoric. That lack of basic political intuition will hobble Truss in Downing Street and could eventually bring her down. But in the meantime Britain’s fortunes will continue to wane. It is now a real possibility that by the10-year anniversary of the Brexit referendum, the country will have suffered a lost decade. And it will have inflicted it on itself.