With Britain’s newly minted Prime Minister coming under serious pressure over her — deeply unpopular with the political and economic establishment — economic policies, rumours are now circulating that Parliamentary Tories are already looking to replace her.
Despite having only just entered office, Liz Truss’ political opponents are already looking to bring her days as Prime Minister to an end, with rumours now reportedly circulating around Westminster that — amid controversy over her tax-cutting economic policies — senior tories are already looking for her replacement.
Although having won out in the battle to replace Boris Johnson as Prime Minister by gaining the confidence of Conservative Party members on the ground in the wider country, Truss never managed to gain the support of the majority of her own parliamentary colleagues. Parliamentary Conservatives, who performed the first sift of candidates to decide who would get through to the final two, showed a preference for the likes of WEF-affiliate Rishi Sunak in his bid to become Prime Minister.
Now that Truss appears to be seriously struggling as a result of her mini-budget, which is not ever so radical but yet seems to have inspired total revulsion in her political opponents and markets, some senior parliamentary bigwigs are rumoured to be plotting her removal. This information comes by way of the editor of major UK Tory blog ConservativeHome, former MP Paul Goodman, telling the BBC that possible replacements are already being scouted.
“All sorts of different people are talking about all sorts of different things,” the former MP told the state broadcaster, emphasising that both Truss, as well as her economics tsar, Kwasi Kwarteng, are now on the proverbial chopping block in his view.
“The Conservative backbenchers are casting around for a possible replacement for Kwasi Kwarteng, and even a possible replacement for Liz Truss,” he continued. “All sorts of names are being thrown around — Rishi Sunak, even Boris Johnson.”
Ultimately, Goodman expressed the fear that the more left-leaning Sunak and Bill Gates-backed Penny Mordaunt and would come to some sort of arrangement that would allow them to oust Liz Truss and replace her with someone else, without having to go back to consult the Conservative Party as a whole in any sort of vote.
“One idea doing the rounds is that Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak — who after all, between them got pretty much two-thirds of the votes of MPs — come to some kind of arrangement and essentially take over,” he said. “I suppose the arrangement would be to come to an agreement about one candidate so that the [ordinary Conservative Party] members are cut out.”
With there being a growing political divide between Conservative Party members in the UK Parliament and Conservative Party members outside of it, it appears reasonable to think any attempt to oust Truss would also attempt to avoid consulting the Tory party base.
Both factions effectively came to blows during the previous party poll last month, with the majority of MPs — who are by and large political centrists — opting to support establishment figures like Rishi Sunak, while grassroots members instead far preferred right-wing conservatives like Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch.
After Braverman and Badenoch were blocked from the final ballot by MPs, Tory members in the country backed the most right-wing candidate left; Liz Truss.
“The sheer number of Conservative MPs who are so against the Truss tax cuts just goes to show all you need to know about the modern Tory party,” Brexiteer Nigel Farage wrote on Thursday, illustrating the growing differences between the two camps.
Having lost out to the Tory base last time, some MPs are said to be now actively blaming the lower-level members within the Conservative Party for electing the now-floundering Truss, and will likely wish to ensure that such a party base will be unable to mess with the grand designs of the establishment should the Prime Minister indeed be removed.
However, there are significant problems with the removal of such a Prime Minister, not least the additional turmoil it would add to an already delicate position the country is in. Further, any new leader would be the fifth Tory Prime Minister in seven years — remarkable, a-historical rate of turnover — so some senior officials in the party have already come out firmly against any such coup.
“I think that changing the leadership would be a disastrously bad idea, not just politically but also economically,” Liz Truss’ own Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, remarked this morning, insisting that Britain’s chaotic markets need certainty.
While most of the media long-ago decided that Liz Truss was going to be a bad Prime Minister, she has proven to have some friends. The Conservative-adjacent Daily Telegraph’s Allister Heath, for instance, delivered an unusually clear-sighted assessment of the present situation in the paper Wednesday, noting dryly that: “Truss is being blamed for the collapse of the debt-fuelled Jenga society that she was trying to replace”.
Others do not seem to be nearly as forgiving, with backbench MPs attacking a recent performance by the Prime Minister in the commons as being “crap” and “wooden”, with one even claiming that the party’s whips — who are responsible for drumming up support for Truss — even failing to act to save the politician.
“She was crap and the atmosphere was pretty flat in the room,” one unnamed MP reportedly told the Huffington Post. “Even the whips couldn’t be bothered getting people to ask supportive questions.”
The politician went on to say that Truss’ only remaining supporters within parliament were “libertarian Jihadists who are wrecking the party”.
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