No.254 – Liz Truss for Prime Minister?

Dear James,

I’ve been away, desperately hoping that the political interregnum being inflicted upon us would be over as painlessly as possible. I should be so lucky!

I can’t remember such weird times. It seems the equivalent to the phoney war of 1940 when our nation awaited the real war to erupt. Today we’d call it the ‘fake war’ but the similarity is unmistakable. Our nation faces its biggest peacetime crisis for decades yet the ‘ruling’ Tory Party is in tatters, divided, its leaders rushing here and there pretending to know what was happening and yet in a blind panic. Soon your party will choose a Prime Minister who neither a large proportion of the voting public nor a majority of your parliamentary colleagues want. Instead we find ourselves subject to the ‘selection’ of a Prime Minister by a tiny minority of 160,000 Tory Party members stumbling about in the fantasy lands of post-Brexit Brexit. The irrelevance of your hustings to the crisis that our nation faces is astonishing. While the nation is crying out for change and new ideas, your Party dwells in the nostalgia of a land that never really was. The British elite decolonised successfully in the 1960s but in the process, forgot to decolonise itself. The notion of innate superiority in your Party mindset still infects our politics and was one of the reasons for Brexit. We just cannot be humble.

Let’s be honest. A Truss win will be disastrous for you, for the Tory Party and for the nation as a whole. To the delight of the current leader of the Labour Party, she will fast become the Tory Party’s very own Jeremy Corbyn. As the avatar of the Taliban fanatics of the extreme right, Miss Truss has neither the political heft nor the economic experience to run our country and she will be found out in short succession. Kier Starmer will eat her for breakfast at the despatch box and her lack of economic sensibility will lay her open to all the wild thinking of her economic guru, Patrick Minford.

And it can’t be very comfortable for you James? After years of craven loyalty to the ‘clown’ you chose to dump Boris at the very last moment plumping on a bet that Sunak would succeed him. Hasn’t turned out like that has it James? Having resigned your government job on the Sunak punt, you’ll now be branded as a Boris betrayer by the Boris loyalist Liz Truss. Nail biting times I guess James? But you’ve changed horses so many times in the past, that one more time won’t make much difference eh?

One of the problems with the overall political debate at the moment is that no one feels able to tell the truth. Neither your Tories nor Kier Starmer are able to admit that Brexit is slowly being revealed as the biggest mistake that a nation could make in peacetime. Much of the current economic and political turmoil,   although certainly not all, is down to the Tory right’s obsession with its Brexit ideology of ‘sovereignty regained’. Even Sir Kier Starmer has decided that we must make the best of post-Brexit Britain in order to keep his red wall constituents on side. Only the Lib-Dems and Greens tell the truth about the undoubted impact that Brexit is having upon our nation. Demands on food banks is increasing, the nation’s debt with the rest of the world is almost 100% of GDP, our exports to our nearest market (The EU) have declined by 15%, our current GDP is already likely to be between 4 and 5% lower than before Brexit and global warming has already caused major fires in London and the South East. Your party James has a lost its bearings and the choice next week of our next Prime Minister week is only going to add fuel to the flames.

The Opinium Poll, in the Observer last Sunday said it all! When the Truss enthusiasts were asked to choose between her and Boris Johnson, 63% said they’d prefer Johnson to 22% whom would vote for Truss. When the same exercise was repeated for Sunak and Johnson, 68% said Johnson and only 19% for Sunak. It seems that there is no real enthusiasm for either.

The Tory Party grassroots are rooted in this failed politician and his failing politics. The poor choice for your party between the current candidates is ‘neither of the above’ but it appears that they will throw their last dice for Truss. Who was it who fiddled while Rome burned?

When the new New Prime Minister is declared next week, they will have zero legitimacy with the majority of the British public. As sure as black is black and white is white, very soon there must be a general election. Only then can the nation begin, at last, after six years of Tory half truths and downright lies, to go forward again.

BH - Your Concerned Constituent