Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, now leader of Britain’s governing Conservative (Tory) Party and due to be formally invited to take the office of Prime Minister by Queen Elizabeth II on Tuesday, has claimed she “will govern as a conservative”.
Truss emphasised that “[d]uring this leadership campaign, I campaigned as a conservative, and I will govern as a conservative” in her speech immediately after being announced as the winner of the party leadership contest by Sir Graham Brady MP, chairman of the 1922 Committee.
The Foreign Secretary was perhaps seeking to assuage the doubts of some in the party grassroots about her left-wing background: Truss was a fairly high-level activist in the Liberal Democrats in her youth. More recently — and perhaps more concerningly — Truss was a member of the left-liberal tendency within the Tory parliamentary party, and campaigned fiercely against Brexit, which she has since claimed to have changed her mind on.
“I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy. I will deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills, but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy supply. And I will deliver on the National Health Service,” she vowed, somewhat vaguely.
The promise to cut taxes — quite imminently, if previous pronouncements can be relied upon — marks a significant departure from governance under the supposedly libertarian Boris Johnson, who, along with Rishi Sunak when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, spoke a great deal about their aspirations to cut taxes but, in practice, increased the tax burden to its heaviest in 70 years.
The self-conscious pledge to “govern as a conservative” after Johnson spent much of his premiership neglecting Brexit, hiking taxes, pushing net-zero green agenda regulations, increasing immigration, and drawing up anti-free speech laws on “online harms” drew pointed remarks from some conservatives outside the official Conservative Party, none more prominent than Brexit champion Nigel Farage.
“New [prime minister] Liz Truss says that she will govern as a conservative… That would make a change from the last 12 years then,” he quipped acidly, the Tories first having reclaimed office under David Cameron in 2010 and having done nothing meaningful with that power since.
Cameron was in many ways responsible for laying the foundations of the Tories’ current reputation as a party which promises conservative governance at elections while delivering the very opposite, perhaps most noticeably on immigration.
At three consecutive elections, Cameron and successor Theresa May promised to reduce net immigration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands” — but never got close to even trying to achieve this, with Cameron’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and consigliere boasting that senior Tories did not support the pledge in private and made a conscious decision to break it.
In other words, one of the most senior politicians in the Conservative party admitted to the party having routinely lied to voters about an important area of policy in order to gain votes dishonestly.
It remains to be seen whether Truss, the former Lib Dem anti-Brexiteer who inexplicably became the Tory right’s candidate of choice in the race to replace Boris Johnson, can break this pattern.
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