Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of Liz Truss and Her Astonishing Rise to Power

by Harry Cole

With the reshuffle almost entirely completed during the final weeks of the campaign, there were few surprises on Tuesday evening, with the new top team all announced by nightfall. All meetings were immediately ‘pared back’ to a handful of officials and advisers, rather than the sprawling sessions under Johnson, and the new PM chose to make the Cabinet table her powerbase rather than the ‘den’ next door preferred by her predecessors.

Prominent Cabinet figures such as Michael Gove, Grant Shapps and Sajid Javid had been culled: a decision that would come back to haunt Truss within weeks.

More noteworthy than ‘a Cabinet of minnows’, as one MP described it, was Truss’s decision to banish almost every No. 10 official except Case and Catsaras from the Cabinet meeting.

Westminster awaited 12 noon on Wednesday 7 September with a morbid curiosity. Truss had never been a particularly strong Commons performer, as evidenced by her previous debuts in Cabinet roles, so it was a full House to see her first weekly duel with Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer.

The opposition looked more than a little confused to have a PM actually attempt to answer the questions, and to give the answers they wanted to put on their leaflets.

Her Majesty died at 15:10. Truss was already working in the privacy of the No. 10 flat on what she would say. Seating space was short after Boris Johnson had taken almost all of the furniture, so some advisers were sitting on the floor at 16:30 when the news came from downstairs via Case that the Queen had died.

Truss’s first conference as leader started with her party in a mutinous mood, and as the conference began that Sunday, she found herself facing an old foe. Unfortunately for her, he is one of the best Tory communicators of his generation. Sitting yards away from the PM in the Kuenssberg studio was Michael Gove, who swiftly tore into the 45p tax cut.

But having lost the faith of the markets, Truss was forced to prostrate herself before their wisdom. And in so doing, she would lose her agenda, her Chancellor, and ultimately, the premiership itself.

Away on holiday in Greece, the all-powerful boss of the backbench 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, had made his disquiet known in a number of calls with Truss. Just as he had warned the PM during the Tory Conference that the 45p tax rate had to be scrapped if she wanted to survive, so he counselled Truss that Kwarteng had to be offered up as a sacrifice if her administration was to remain in any way credible.

On Monday morning, Hunt gave an extraordinary statement to the nation. In seven minutes, he unceremoniously binned ‘almost all’ the mini-Budget pledges the Truss government had announced just a few weeks earlier.

Treasury sums indicated that increasing high-skilled migration over the rest of this decade could raise £14 billion, meaning fewer tax rises and spending cuts would be needed.

Seven weeks to the day after Liz Truss beat Rishi Sunak in the Tory leadership election, Conservative MPs crowned him their new leader, this time without risking another vote of the party membership.

The flashpoints of her short premiership are clear: the personnel and policy decisions taken at Chevening, the mini-Budget drawn up in secret and the subsequent U-turn played out brutally in public, the sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng and then the farce of the fracking vote.

‘Bouncebackability’ is a quality that Truss’s supporters say she has in spades, along with an inexhaustible work ethic and a nose for when to ditch a fight she is not going to win. Even Michael Gove admits: ‘You don’t serve under three Prime Ministers, you don’t come back from the assaults and reverses she suffered at the MoJ, you don’t come back from that, you don’t become Prime Minister in a strongly contested field unless you are a good politician.’

Rishi Sunak optimistically told MPs in the moments after he had been declared their leader that their party has never been more united on Europe. And he’s right, to a degree. But the classic schism over EU membership that tore through the party for 20 years was actually masking deeper ideological splits.

Two camps came together under the Leave banner: the free marketeers who wanted to look beyond Europe, and the anti-immigration right. Those two camps are now at war. Remain was a broad church for the left of the party covering up the cracks between the social justice warriors who want more spending on benefits, and the reformers who do not believe that more money is the simple answer.

Rishi Sunak’s fate now depends on whether the various rebel camps will back off from him in a way they did not for Truss. Only the extreme optimists think that will happen.