Liz Truss is offering lessons on how to be popular

9 months ago 4

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LONDON — Liz Truss wants to tell the Tories how to be popular again. Good luck, as they say, with that.

Truss, booted from office as U.K. prime minister after just 49 days in the job — an all-time record — is the star attraction Tuesday as her new Popular Conservatives pressure group holds its official launch in Westminster.

The newly-formed caucus of right-wing Tory MPs and candidates wants to “reform Britain’s bureaucratic structures to allow Conservative values to flourish” — and is promising to help Tories “advance these policies across the country, whilst demonstrating their popularity.”

Whether Truss is the right person to win over the British public is another matter.

Fresh polling by Savanta on the eve of the launch finds Truss is the least popular politician in the country, with a net favorability score of minus 54 percent.

“Liz Truss is very unpopular,” says Scarlett Maguire, director at polling consultancy JL Partners.

“Rishi Sunak is doing very badly with the public now, but we should remember that Liz Truss was doing even worse.”

Truss, of course, is still firmly associated with a disastrous seven weeks in office which saw her crash the U.K. economy, sending interest rates spiralling as a result, and then resign after losing command of her own party.

Savanta’s latest polling rates Truss even worse than her chaotic predecessor Boris Johnson, who sits at minus 25 percent; and her beleagured successor Rishi Sunak, who’s on minus 27 percent.

Chris Hopkins, political research director at pollster Savanta, said that while “many ideas associated with free-market Conservatism are popular with the U.K. public,” Truss herself is not.

“It is ironic — Popular Conservatism couldn’t find a more unpopular spokesperson if they actively tried,” he said.

Yet Truss is the key face at the PopCons — as they’ve instantly been dubbed — event Tuesday, alongside other headline speakers including her old Cabinet colleague Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the outspoken ex Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, who quit his job last month demanding tougher government action on asylum seekers.

Mark Littlewood, an old friend of Truss and veteran of the libertarian Institute of Economic Affairs think tank, is spearheading the movement behind the scenes.

A champion of Truss’ deregulatory brand of economics, Littlewood used an Sunday Telegraph article ahead of the launch to urge Tories to back “economic freedom and lower taxes,” to take on the “anti-free-speech warriors who want to cancel everyone for everything” — and for Sunak to push through plans to deport asylum seekers to the central African nation of Rwanda, even if doing so requires Britain opting out of the European Convention on Human Rights.

“If we don’t have a plan to tackle these impediments to freedom, achieving Conservative outcomes will forever feel like pushing water uphill,” he warned.

Five families? Make that six

The field for Tory splinter groups is increasingly crowded, however.

The PopCons are just the latest Tory caucus aiming to make a mark on a party which looks headed for a crushing defeat at the next U.K. general election, now less than 12 months away.

Five other splinter groups of right-wing Tories, known collectively as the “five families,” were already dominating Westminster conversations before Christmas as they staged a mass revolt designed to toughen up Sunak’s stalled Rwanda plan.

Henry Hill, deputy editor of grassroots website Conservative Home, describes this extraordinary level of Tory factionalism as the party’s “warlord era.”

“Normally the Conservative Party has a very strong central leadership,” he tells POLITICO. “[Former Tory leader] William Hague once described the party as an absolute monarchy, moderated by regicide.

“The problem at the moment is that the leadership isn’t able to exert sufficient authority to play to that traditional role.”

PM Sunak, Hill notes, “entered Downing Street after one of the weakest prime ministers in modern history” when he succeeded Truss, and “didn’t really have a mandate for any kind of ideological program or policy program” beyond sorting out the crisis that erupted under her short leadership.

“Into that void, the various factions are stepping up,” he says — all of them aiming to shape the Tory debate over the next decade.

For his part, Littlewood insists that the PopCons are not trying to push Sunak out of power before the election, and warns another leadership election for the Tories would be “madness.”

But Maguire, the JL Partners pollster, says the launch of the PopCons is nevertheless a “very public display of disunity,” even if those involved aren’t directly criticizing the prime minister.

“By putting these things forward, they are saying they feel like the current administration is doing a bad job … and that, I think, is just the most damaging thing when you look at public opinion on this,” she adds.

Centrist Tories, meanwhile, despair at the sight of colleagues trying to hammer out their disagreements in public.

Former Tory Culture Secretary Ed Vaizey told Times Radio that the latest push was “absolutely ludicrous” — and could help deliver an even worse rout for the Tories than the general election disaster of 1997, which ushered in more than a decade of Labour rule.

“The PopCons — it’s the sixth family. We’ve got five families tearing the Tory Party apart. Now we’ve got a sixth just in time for the general election,” he sighed.

Enter Farage

One person enjoying the spectacle, however, is Brexiteer-in-chief Nigel Farage.

Farage — who has left the door open to rejoining the Conservative Party after a 32-year absence — is also expected to show up at Tuesday’s launch, albeit as a media commentator in his job at right-wing news channel GB News.

But Farage has already likened the PopCons to his own right-wing startup party Reform UK, currently led by his friend Richard Tice. Reform has spooked Tory strategists with its ability to hoover up votes on the right — and Farage hinted that at some point, a merger could be on the cards.

“If you look at what I anticipate Truss is going to say, and what Richard Tice is saying, then you have to think that at some point in time these people will all be together,” he told the Telegraph.

“I think there is the possibility of a post-election major realignment occurring — and I can see PopCon potentially as being part of that process.”

Watch this space.

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