You know these people who say: YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST! Well, here I am, ready to share my wildest prediction with you. The next prime minister, Liz Truss, will not even make it to Christmas and the disgraced soon to be former prime minister Boris Johnson will be back.
My loyal reader will know that I do not exactly have a hotline to the centre of the Conservative party, but as the song goes I gotta feeling this is how things will go.
Unless Truss is a genius at hiding her talent – spoiler alert: she isn’t – the economic tsunami that’s only weeks away, with soaring utility bills, roaring inflation and rising interest rates, she will be overwhelmed. She will be hopelessly out of her depth, surrounded by a cabinet with even less talent than Boris Johnson’s. Without drastic and urgent action, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs, thousands of businesses will go to the wall and many millions will be unable to pay fuel bills. Truss will have one shot at this and her current plan to cut corporation tax and NI, which will benefit the better off more than anyone else, will do nothing.
What Truss should do next week is to fully embrace Labour’s policy to freeze the utility price cap . They’ve frozen bills at 4% in France. There is nothing to stop the government doing the same here. My feeling is that Truss will offer a halfway house which satisfies no one. And all hell will then be let loose.
An inexperienced, over-promoted PM with few principles and only her personal ambition to offer would be confronted by a broken country, arguably a country in a state of near collapse, her MPs desperately worried about their parliamentary seats. The one thing about the Tory party is that it is utterly ruthless. If it convinced Truss is a loser, they will remove her, regardless of how long she has been in Number 10. And if they did, who would they turn to? They wouldn’t, would they?
If Boris Johnson has been on the ballot paper alongside Truss and Sunak, he’d have strolled it by a landslide. The party membership still love ‘Boris’, despite his lies and incompetence. “He’s a winner,” they will say. “Only he can save our seats,” the MPs will say. Who would bet against that happening? Don’t forget that where Truss has constantly shifting beliefs, Johnson has none at all. Where others might blink before turning on the money taps to help people pay their bills, Johnson would just do it. And who knows if once again Johnson would regain his former popularity?
I could be completely wrong and if so you read a load of old bollocks here first. And I really hope I am. But I’m not convinced I am.
