Things Fall Apart

My sense that Truss had only days left as Prime Minister last Friday turned out to be right. The humiliating u-turn on nearly all of the measures in her “mini”-budget on Monday morning appeared, at first, to have settled the markets and bought her a little more time. But it also stripped her of any remaining authority. On Tuesday most MPs felt removing her could wait until after Jeremy Hunt’s next set of announcements on the 31st October but then the shambles that unfolded on Wednesday demonstrated that our system simply doesn’t work if the Prime Minister cannot command any confidence.

The sacking of Home Secretary Suella Braverman was survivable in the short term, though it was certainly an odd call for someone who desperately needed support from across her party. The evening mayhem was not. Labour’s opposition day motion on fracking was very cleverly designed. Usually governments just ignore these motions, which are typically non-binding, and abstain. But this one would have forced a binding debate on a Bill at the end of November. The government needed, therefore, to defeat the motion and were worried that a three-line whip alone would not be enough. So they walked right into Labour’s trap and made it a confidence motion, which would have meant that Tory MPs voting against lost the whip. But, in a panic, with just 10 mins before the vote No 10 let it be known that it wasn’t a confidence motion, without telling the whips.

All hell broke loose. MPs were yelling at each other. Ministers were trying to force backbenchers through the lobby to vote with the Government. The Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip both resigned with the latter walking off saying “I’m f**king furious and I don’t give a f**k anymore”. Veteran MP Charles Walker gave a powerful and emotional interview describing his horror at the chaos which immediately went viral. I received several texts from MPs describing their shame at “the grotesque embarrassment” of their party disintegrating.

The Chief Whip and her Deputy were then persuaded to un-resign but the damage had been done. Too many letters had gone into Graham Brady for him to be able to hold off a rule change and Truss was forced to resign. She became the shortest serving Prime Minister in history and the first in over 80 years to never fight an election. Her stint little more than a bout of constitutional food poisoning.

I have no particular desire to stick the boot in any more. Having worked with her a decade ago I warned during the summer leadership contest of the risk that she would be catastrophically bad, though even I never imagined it would be this bad. The opportunist MPs who voted for her in the hope of jobs and preferment have, as Charles Walker said, caused immense damage to their party and the country, and they’ve left her humiliated and broken. The membership shouldn’t be let off the hook completely. It was evident that she was a poor communicator and a big risk taker during the summer (remember the plan to pay nurses in the north less – the one that had to be pulled within a day?) But ultimately this is the fault of Boris Johnson, and his backers, who picked her as their favourite, and associated newspapers like the Daily Mail who supported her relentlessly, largely to spite Rishi Sunak.

The contest