By Max Hastings
One of the most foolish traditional proverbs is “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” — in olden times, it was always a man. In truth, history shows that most often, instead of a Lincoln, Roosevelt, Churchill, Thatcher, De Gaulle or Nehru stepping up to the plate when disaster strikes, nations are obliged to meet the dark hour with inadequate, if not outright incompetent leaders.
So it seems in Britain now. A new prime minister has assumed office whom even her supporters fear unfit to engage in the emergencies she faces. A whirlwind of misfortunes is sweeping the country: Energy price escalation on a scale that would bankrupt millions of people and tens of thousands of businesses if that new leader, Liz Truss, didn’t now promise vast state relief (which a mere week ago she dismissed as “handouts”); double-digit inflation; a stumbling economy; the Ukraine war; trade-union militance unseen for half a century; tottering public services.
And overshadowing all these for at least the days and weeks ahead is, of course, the death of Britain’s Queen.
Polls within the ruling Conservative Party show that its rank-and-file members would prefer to have stuck with Truss’s disgraced but shameless predecessor, Boris Johnson. Respected columnist and former Tory MP Matthew Parris, who served his political apprenticeship on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s staff, writes brutally of the new prime minister: “she’s crackers.”
Truss’s admirers point to her poised and dignified response to the Queen’s death, and say: “People were as rude about Thatcher in 1979.” She, too, assumed the premiership at a time of galloping inflation, industrial anarchy and sustained British decline. But few ever questioned the Iron Lady’s intelligence and lifelong political consistency.
Thatcher’s front bench included some outstandingly able politicians. She also possessed steely discipline. I have never forgotten an early insight into her character in 1973, when I visited her second-floor office for an interview during her tenure as education secretary in the Edward Heath government. When I left and pressed the button at the head of the stairway for the elevator, Thatcher called scornfully after me: “You’re young! You should walk.” Six years later, such words became her message to the British people. And it worked.
Today looks different. Judging from Truss’s serial conversions and apostasies since youth, she is bereft of convictions save about her own fitness for power. She has been a prominent member of the governments that have failed Britain through the past 12 years.
Since Johnson made her foreign secretary last year, she has displayed more mastery of photo-opportunities than engagement with serious issues. A senior armed forces officer who has travelled abroad with her observes that she chose to be accompanied by media and personal advisers, rather than by Foreign Office experts.
Like Johnson, Truss became a standard-bearer for the right because she saw that its free-market nationalists held the keys to power. The outgoing prime minister has remade the Conservatives as the Johnson Party, ruthlessly expelling distinguished former ministers and MPs who declined to toe his line in a fashion that no previous leader, not even Thatcher, dared to do. Truss’s new cabinet includes not a single MP who supported her defeated rival for the leadership, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak.
Her first speech as leader heaped praise on her predecessor. Few of us doubt that, as Johnson hoped and the British people have feared for months, she will prove the continuity prime minister. She echoes Johnson’s enthusiasm for pseudo-Churchillian rhetoric, crafted to please her right-wing supporters rather than the nation at large. Yet paradoxically, free-marketers are appalled by her non-means-tested commitment to freeze the nation’s electricity bills for two years, at a guesstimated cost north of £150 billion.
At a party last week given by a Tory elder statesman, a former prime minister said to me: “I simply do not recognize today’s Conservative Party as the one I served for 30 years.” Back in the 20th century, we centrists disliked but did not fear the right, because its handful of maverick MPs had only nuisance influence. Today they dominate Britain’s government, mirroring the stranglehold on US Republicans held by former President Donald Trump’s loyalists.
The related puzzle on both sides of the Atlantic is that so many blue-collar voters, to whom both the GOP and British Tories have almost nothing to offer, nonetheless back these parties of the rich. Truss last week restated her opposition to fiscal redistribution, urging instead the case for boosting the better-off.
The only plausible explanation for British blue-collar attitudes is racial identity — opposition to immigration — which remains a critical force in the Tory agenda, despite Truss’s elevation of MPs from ethnic minorities to key jobs in her cabinet. Johnson’s people, now Truss’s, offer their supporters a nostalgic vision of our respective nations which only time can expose as fantasy.
She has entered 10 Downing Street amid widespread fears about what her eagerness to show boldness may prompt her to attempt. She won the leadership campaign on the back of promises of tax cuts that most economists think reckless, and to which she appears to remain committed.
She seems eager to escalate Britain’s already confrontational relationship with its former European Union partners by tearing up the Northern Ireland section of the Brexit treaty, to appease right-wing Ulster Unionists and in breach of international law. Asked last month if France is our country’s friend or foe, she responded combatively: “The jury’s out.” She said that she will judge President Emmanuel Macron by “deeds, not words.”
The two most respected ministers in the last government were Sunak and Michael Gove, neither of whom has been invited to serve under Truss. Her new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, is well thought of, as is former leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch, now trade secretary. But Truss has also brought into her cabinet as business secretary the Brexiteer obsessive Jacob Rees-Mogg, an 18th-century throwback who is an object of derision to much of the country. Despite her professed commitment to unity, she has created a right-wing factional government.
This is an extraordinary spectacle, and a frightening one for most of us Britons. We behold our country facing grave issues in the hands of a leadership that it is hard to characterize as responsible. To be sure, the same was said of the US during the years of Donald Trump, and the nation survived his administration. But America is vastly larger, richer and more powerful than Britain, which has just slipped from fifth to sixth in the world league table of economies, behind India.
More than a few people in many nations, facing a similar deficit of leadership to that in Britain, are asking each other: How did we come to this? How do we find ourselves at the mercy of such indifferent politicians? I am a keen reader of the 19th-century novels of Anthony Trollope, who in several of his tales set in the political world caused his characters to say such things as “a man may aspire to no greater honour than to serve as a member of Britain’s House of Commons.”
In those days, of course, Queen Victoria’s people ruled half the world, which infused a savor into power such as today belongs instead to members of the US Congress, or even the Chinese politburo. Money also plays a part: The gulf has widened immeasurably between the lifestyle that an elected politician can expect and the rewards accessible to successful people in other walks of life. Moreover, the forfeiture of privacy and lack of respect and even decency accorded to public servants, reflected in social media persecutions, is an important factor in deterring talent.
In every society save dictatorships, those in charge are expected to follow codes of behavior that contribute as much as written constitutions to making governance work. In the US, these understandings are threatened by gerrymandering of congressional districts, attempts to manipulate voting procedures, and partisan packing of the Supreme Court.
In Britain, from 1965 Conservative leaders were chosen by ballots of the party’s members of parliament, who had firsthand experience of rival candidates, and were the elected representatives of voters. Then in 1998, a new system was introduced that gave the final choice of leader to rank-and-file party members who merely pay a small subscription and are elected by nobody. Under this perversion of the parliamentary system, a mere 81,326 British Tories have been permitted to choose not merely their own party leader, but the mistress of 60 million people.
Truss has secured victory, despite a reputation for shallowness of which she herself seems oblivious. A friend who worked closely with her as foreign secretary — which at the time was thought one of Johnson’s more satirical appointments — says: “Liz’s problem is less that she is not very clever than that she is convinced she is.”
She aspires to be Margaret Thatcher, to which end she wishes to show herself strong. This reflects a misreading of history because although the Iron Lady talked tough, a surprising theme of her premiership was its caution: She delayed picking most of the big fights until she was sure of winning them. She would never have done as Johnson and now Truss has done, appointing a cabinet of loyalists, heedless of abilities.
“With me what you see is what you get,” Truss told a TV interviewer last week. But most of us cling to hopes that now our fourth prime minister in six years has assumed office, she will retreat from some of the rash promises she made in her leadership campaign.
Hearts sank when she spoke out on Monday in praise of Johnson, an act comparable to Gerald Ford’s ill-advised pardon to Richard Nixon upon assuming the presidency in 1974. But even Nixon eventually offered some sort of apology to the American people, as Johnson will never do to Britain. Truss reportedly plans to shut down the parliamentary investigation into Johnson’s alleged lies to the House of Commons, which it is assumed must find him guilty, if permitted to report.
Political history suggests that it is hard for any leader who assumes the premiership at the tail end of a long period of government by one party to make much of it. The Tory leader Alec Douglas-Home, who got the job in 1963 after Harold Macmillan’s government was felled by scandal, was evicted by voters the following year.
Labour’s Jim Callaghan survived three years after succeeding Harold Wilson in 1976 but spent them lurching from crisis to crisis. The same was true of Gordon Brown, who followed Labour leader Tony Blair in 2007, and of the Tory Theresa May, who succeeded David Cameron in 2016. None enjoyed much fun, or much success.
If it seems unlikely that Britain’s leadership troubles could get worse, consider a scenario already canvassed at Westminster: Truss and her Tories are defeated at the 2024 general election. A Labour government, or possibly a Labour-led coalition, then assumes power, which also fails to overcome the nation’s intractable economic problems. Re-enter Boris Johnson, who leaps onto the stage with a merry laugh and a wave to announce that he is ready once more to serve, to make Britain great again.
In the new, terrifying, post-truth, post-morality age of democratic politics, Johnson’ political base goes on loving him, heedless of the Everest of evidence of his deceits, corrupt practices, incompetence, laziness, recklessness and self-obsession.
I am often asked if we have seen the last of Boris. The answer is the same as with Trump: In an age when democratic politics is increasingly dominated by charlatans rather than serious and responsible players, Johnson, like his transatlantic soulmates, will continue to cause mayhem until the day he drops.
For perhaps three decades, between Thatcher and David Cameron, Britain contrived to be both a prosperous and reasonably successful society. Its descent from that condition, much influenced by the Brexit flight from Europe that was driven by right-wing nationalists such as now dominate the Conservative Party, has been frighteningly swift.
Today the ascent to Downing Street of Liz Truss, amid the near-collapse of the pound and prospect of an industrial and social Winter of Discontent, represents a historic moment. Britain is in grave danger of becoming not merely diminished, but worse: a laughingstock.