Consciousness of Sheep
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Ever since the cheese speech went viral, satirists and serious opponents have latched onto the idea that our new “worst prime minister ever” is intellectually challenged. For sure, her inability to find her way out of her own press conference, and more alarmingly, her apparent belief that Ukraine was an island in the Baltic Sea suggest that she might be among the bluntest knives in the Tory draw. On the other hand, she managed to scrape through a PPE degree from Merton College, Oxford in the days before Blair had turned higher education into a cargo cult. And she even managed to hold down jobs as an economist for Shell and Cable and Wireless.
It is though, Truss’s meteoric rise to the top job which should be of most concern to her opponents. While Truss followed the common route of fighting no hope elections in 2001 and 2005 – the second of which she came close to winning – she did not enter parliament until 2010, when she was put on Cameron’s “A-list” to get more women and minority candidates into Parliament. Truss infamously almost blew it after not declaring an affair she had had with her political mentor, which resulted in an unsuccessful move to de-select her as the candidate for the safe South West Norfolk seat.
After becoming an MP at the 2010 election, Truss became a junior minister – Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education – between 2012 and 2014, when she joined the cabinet as Environment Secretary. She has remained in the cabinet – under three prime ministers – ever since, as Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, International Trade Secretary, and most recently Foreign Secretary. You have to go back to John Major to find the last prime minister to reach the top job so quickly – but where major had a longer real career before being elected in 1979, Truss went straight from student politics to grown up politics with just two, short-lived jobs between. And unlike Truss, Major lacked cabinet experience before happening to be in the right place at the right time to prevent Heseltine from replacing Thatcher in 1990.
Truss’s rise is in stark contrast to the woman she appears to model herself on. Thatcher, remember, had first entered parliament in 1959, and served as Secretary for Pensions in the MacMillan government. She was more famous for her role as Education Secretary during the Heath (1970-74) government, where she earned the nickname “Thatcher the milk snatcher” after she ended the practice of giving free milk to Britain’s school children. Regarded as an extremist even within the Tory Party, Thatcher was viewed as an outsider in the contest to replace Edward Heath following the two election defeats in February and October 1974. However, following Keith Joseph’s faux pas of calling for the sterilisation of the working classes, Thatcher became the preferred candidate of the neoliberal right within a Tory Party determined to end the post-war consensus.
Thatcher’s long hard slog to the premiership, then, is in stark contrast to Truss’s rapid rise up the greasy pole. And this suggests that while Truss suffers a lack of academic competence, she may have learned the Machiavellian dark arts of power politics. And if so, that makes her a dangerous opponent indeed. Moreover, she appears to have recognised her own intellectual weakness – in a way that her predecessor never did – and has compensated by bringing in advisors from extreme neoliberal organisations like the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute. It may well be that while those advisors write the policy detail, Truss will be happy just to act as the presenter, while charming and backstabbing her way to maintaining and extending her grip on power.
The gamble is that the current lack of opposition will gift her the next general election irrespective of how bad Britain’s energy and economic predicament becomes. That is, while the old adage holds that governments lose elections, even this requires that there is some semblance of a competent opposition waiting to take over. Under Keith Starmer, opposition has been reduced to doing the same thing the Tories are doing, but claiming a Labour government would do more, faster and better. But in reality, Starmer’s Labour Party lacks any credible analysis of Britain’s predicament, still less a programme of government to mitigate the growing storm.
Who knows, Truss may even take a leaf out of the Blairite playbook and simply borrow a shedload of new currency to subsidise energy and give the illusion of rising prosperity that comes from a temporary tax cut. So long as repayment doesn’t fall due before the next general election, and barring Labour suddenly discovering a backbone, Truss could go on to be the most enduring prime minister since Blair.
As you made it to the end…
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