Truss was uniquely awful, but the Tories’ problems run far deeper than a dud PM

The Conservative Party’s method to replace Liz Truss will be somewhat shorter than its process to replace Boris Johnson: MPs nominating for the leadership will need at least 100 supporters within the parliamentary party, before a ballot to knock out all but the final two, if needed. The Tory membership will then have its say in an online ballot to be completed next Friday.

Having saddled the parliamentary party with the disaster of Liz Truss, there’s no guarantee that the Tory base won’t impose another disaster on MPs. Boris Johnson, after enduring a Churchillian wilderness of, erm, two months, is said to be considering running.

The return of Johnson would make the UK even more of a laughing stock than it now is after Truss’ record short prime ministership, which ended in shouting, bullying and chaos after she lost control of her party in the Commons earlier this week, never mind the demolition of her tax cut package by new chancellor Jeremy Hunt.

There was, in the end, less to Truss than met the eye. I wrote earlier this week about her return to neoliberalism after the Johnson years of ideological incoherence, but the debacle of her weeks in office was down to what was obvious all along: she was politically maladroit, to an astonishing degree, and her chancellor was even more so. If politics is the art of the possible, for Truss and Kwarteng it became the art of the farcical, with the government of a major economy prepared, seemingly, to spring massive fiscal surprises on financial markets and then profess that all was well amid a financial sector in meltdown.

Truss was there because the Tory membership had chosen her over the more economically orthodox Rishi Sunak. Truss had promised big tax cuts of the kind that appealed to typical Tory members — wealthy provincials, business figures, Colonel Blimp types convinced the country’s gone to the dogs since Disraeli/Churchill/Macmillan/Thatcher stopped running the show — and promptly delivered them under the guise of stimulating growth, heedless of either the electoral or financial impacts.

That divide between the Tory membership and the parliamentary party, which preferred Sunak by a significant margin, is one of many within the Conservative Party: between Brexiteers and Remainers, between traditional Tories and Thatcherite neoliberals, between heartland Tories and new, post-2019 MPs holding former Labour seats. And on top of all was Johnson’s default nationalist settings of large government, “levelling up” and low immigration.

The product of all those splits is a political party without any clear idea of itself, one unmoored even from the early years of its current term in office. Theresa May called for a leader who can unite the party, but there is no such figure, especially given the state of inflation and budget deficit in the UK. The Tories have been split asunder by the nativism, resentment of neoliberalism and hostility to expertise that they sought to exploit as have other right-wing parties around the world.

Truss will become a historical footnote, a trivia night question, but her party and its incomprehension of what it actually stands for will limp on under new, or perhaps old, management to electoral defeat sooner or later.