Liz Truss is now the Prime Minister of Great Britain after comfortably beating Sunak in the ballot of Tory party members. She quickly ejected from the Cabinet a lot of dead wood who stabbed Boris in the back, hoping to personally benefit from doing so, and has accordingly sent a strong message about loyalty being more beneficial than treachery. This differs from 1990 and 2019 where some shockingly disloyal spivs did quite well out of bringing down the incumbent PM.
Truss is promising to be more right-wing and more supportive of the free enterprise economic system. We shall see what eventuates.
It was a pity she decided to get all silly and appoint Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, and Home Secretary based on skin colour rather than merit but I am pleased Kemi Badenoch has been catapulted into a senior position.
I expect this will see a turnaround in the opinion polls for the Tory party. I expect them to take the lead next week and probably be 10% ahead by Christmas in the Tories 42% Labour 32% range. It sets up a 5th term in office in due course as the Labour party doesn’t really exist outside of the London chattering classes.
As in New Zealand, most of the media in Britain are Labour voters and keep the rotting corpse of the party alive by giving them endless publicity – often in a laughable way. The way the media tells it the Shadow Cabinet are (to quote Sir Jack Marshall) “Man for man the better team”; a collection of morally virtuous political heavyweights who will win an election on a Thursday, take office on a Friday, and push a big red button sitting on the wall in 10 Downing Street on Saturday thereby magically solving all of Britain’s problems.
(Just going to pause here to let you finish laughing)
This viewpoint – that Britain has been somehow “robbed” by not having this team of infallible saints as its government – is not new; the media used to flog the same twaddle about Hugh Gaitskell in the 1950s, and historians (who are all left-wingers too) dutifully wrote numerous books saying the exact same thing.
It was the same with the 1980s Labour crowd; fall down drunken alcoholic John Smith, when the booze finally killed him, was portrayed as “the best PM we never had”, and “Shame the country was robbed by Smith being in opposition during the Thatcher years” (etc). All very cringy.
If you care to cast a glance at the Shadow Cabinet you notice two things. First, there are 7 members – Reeves, Reynolds, Ashworth, Phillipson, Powell, Nandy, and Murray who entered Parliament on the same day as Liz Truss. And all have achieved precisely nothing in the 12 and a half years since (despite being morally virtuous political heavyweights).
The second thing you notice is the rest all entered Parliament after Liz Truss first entered the Cabinet; whilst they have been outdoing each other to be the most “woke”, part of the largest number of ‘victim groups’, Truss has been doing things and making policy. But of course, it is they, not her, who are the political heavyweights. And Britain has been robbed, accordingly.
Are you starting to see why Truss can expect a fairly easy victory at the next election yet?