Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 25

Trussonomics has been exposed as a childish absurdity. Trussopolitics is even worse | Simon Jenkins

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng must now eat humble pie and try to steer Britain out of the crisis they created

Anyone who heard Liz Truss on her leadership election trail sensed the Tory party was going to make a mistake. Now we know. It is inconceivable that Britain would be where it is today had Rishi Sunak become prime minister. Even so, few could have imagined the scale of this disaster. A cabinet drunk on the billions it had spent fighting Covid thought it could spend the same again on a gratu...

Pouring cash into London to solve regional inequality? That's trickle-down Trussonomics | Simon Jenkins

The UK economy needs the rest of the country to help reverse decades of decline – even Boris Johnson knew that

Traders in the City of London were punching the air at Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget last week. It was small wonder. He had granted some of them hundreds of thousands of pounds. By way of contrast, “red wall” Tory MPs’ hearts were sinking. Kwarteng’s new tax measures might have had one aim in view: to benefit London’s economy at the expense of the rest of the country. His former boss Bori...

Putin’s nuclear threat shows a desperate man out of options | Simon Jenkins

Using such weapons has no tactical purpose – it would only lose the Russian president support at home and abroad

Vladimir Putin is ready to use a nuclear weapon in his ongoing attempt to conquer Ukraine. Or so says Vladimir Putin. The reason is that his conquest has been justly defeated so far and he sees no other way forward. The prospect of such an escalation is appalling. A line would be crossed. Nuclear-armed powers round the world would regard it as a licence. It might not be the end of the ...

All this pomp and splendour proves it: without our support the royals can’t survive | Simon Jenkins

The public mourning for the Queen has been a PR triumph for the royal family. But this shouldn’t disguise the need for reform

Ten days of mourning for the death of Queen Elizabeth II reached their climax at Westminster Abbey today, with a tear in the eye of the nation and hundreds of world leaders in attendance. They came to honour not power or achievement but a ceremony of nationhood in one person. They have witnessed an extraordinary week of recent British history, a week in which nothing else ...

Why is Liz Truss sacking top civil servants? Because she wants to suppress dissent | Simon Jenkins

This is government Trump-style – the PM would rather lose the benefits of insight and experience than tolerate opposing views

The prime minister’s peremptory sacking of the head of the Treasury, Tom Scholar, is ominous. It was one of her first decisions and cannot have been anything he said or did. She had already let it be known, through “allies”, that she also intended to sack the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, but apparently changed her mind. Scholar’s sin was that he supposedly embodied the “...

Facile, empty and cliched – Liz Truss’s first week has been a disaster | Simon Jenkins

The new prime minister made promises on the campaign trail she hoped would be forgotten. She is already paying the price

Liz Truss may not make an exciting or popular Tory leader, but she may have one thing going for her. She may be lucky. A mere 12% of voters expect her to be a good prime minister. But, just as Tony Blair was eased into Downing Street by his handling of the death of Diana (his “people’s princess”), so the death of the Queen could help Truss steady and establish herself.

As the na...

King Charles III has views and passions, but his first job is to reform the monarchy’s image | Simon Jenkins

He will be a very different monarch to his mother. He should use that to his and the nation’s advantage

King Charles intends to reign – he would say serve – precisely as did his mother. His entire life has been spent in the shadow of her performance, and he has been tutored at every turn in the role of the occupant of the throne. He knows that the nation has regarded the Queen as the apotheosis of constitutional monarchy. His is unlikely to be a long reign, and he will not want to betray his moth...

The first thing Prime Minister Liz Truss needs to do? U-turn on everything she believes in | Simon Jenkins

She’s a small-state ideologue, but all that matters is that she carries the UK through this economic crisis

Liz Truss enters Downing Street tomorrow to face an economic emergency that is unprecedented in peacetime. She will meet it, we are told, with £100bn of public money, significantly more than what her predecessor, Boris Johnson, spent on furlough during the Covid crisis. This will require a blatant U-turn for a prime minister who spent the summer campaigning for office on a pledge of no more...

Britain’s traumatised education system needs a break – and a decent minister | Simon Jenkins

After two-plus years of Covid and seven secretaries of state in the past six years, teachers and students deserve more support

To be Her Majesty’s secretary of state for education has become a bad joke. There have been seven in the past six years, three in the past two months. Like Keeper of the Wardrobe or Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the job means nothing besides acting as a visible reminder of the decay of serious government under Boris Johnson.

After two years of trauma, Britain’s educatio...

The first task for a Prime Minister Truss: get Sunak back into cabinet | Simon Jenkins

Her rival to the Tory throne would at least bring some coherence to an otherwise extraordinarily lightweight front bench

British politics has this past month been an exercise in torture. Rishi Sunak’s bid for Downing Street is like that of a boxer told at the start of a contest that the judges have already decided he has lost. He has had to fight on while his opponent, Liz Truss, goes on a victory tour. The resulting campaign has so damaged both candidates that Tory members – and the public in ge...