One of Queen Elizabeth II’s first official duties in 1952 was to receive her first prime minister, Winston Churchill. One of her last, two days before her death on Sept. 8, was to receive her 15th prime minister, Liz Truss. The splendid obsequies for Elizabeth Windsor, some of them ancient but some surprisingly modern, culminate in Britain’s first state funeral since Winston Churchill’s send-off in 1965. Meanwhile, Mary Elizabeth Truss has quietly accomplished the less spectacular Georgian ritual of assembling a new Cabinet.
These images of continuity belie the shock of the royal transition and the challenge of the political one. The British have a new monarch and a new prime minister at the same time. If precedents for this exist, they are so far back in the medieval mists as to be irrelevant. Never mind the Wars of the Roses, most Britons cannot remember the imperial era before Elizabeth. While the prime ministers came and went, her 70-year reign set a new record, exceeding even the 64 years of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. The new King Charles III also sets a record: At 73, he is the oldest new monarch in British history. Only the most senior of his subjects can clearly remember the days when they were the New Elizabethans and Britain still believed itself to be a first-rank global power.
The political system is also going through a period of unusual turbulence. It was not just the passing of time that gave Elizabeth the impression that her prime ministers were coming and going with increasing regularity. In the 15 years between 2007 and 2022, she approved the nomination of five prime ministers. The 15 years before that, 1991 to 2006, saw only two prime ministers. The accelerated turnover is caused by Brexit, which has now unseated three Conservative prime ministers in six years.
The incoming prime minister sets one new record. Truss is Britain’s third female prime minister. The country that is supposed to be run by an “old boys’ network” of men who all went to the same boarding schools has now produced more female leaders than any other democracy. All three have been Conservatives, and all three were state-schooled, apart from Theresa May’s middle school years. Labour, the party of equality and now “equity,” too, is led by Sir Keir Starmer, a knight of the realm.
Truss is also likely to set another, less glorious record: Her tenure may be among the shortest in the modern history of 10 Downing Street. Truss has just over two years before she must call a general election, but she inherits a dire situation. The economy is teetering on recession. Britain has the highest inflation rate of any G-7 nation. Energy prices and the cost of living have risen faster than at any time in the last 40 years. In early September, the pound twice slid to $1.14, its lowest exchange rate since 1985. Public trust in the political class has collapsed.
Margaret Thatcher inherited a similarly dire situation in 1979, but she bore no responsibility for its creation. The Conservatives cannot dodge their culpability for the mess that Britain is in, nor can Truss. The party has been in power since 2010, and Truss has risen accordingly. Since 2014, she has served as environment secretary (2014-16), justice secretary and lord chancellor (2016-17), chief secretary to the Treasury (2019-21), international trade secretary (2019-21), and foreign secretary (2021-22). We shall now discover whether her rise was the reward of personal talent or the result of a party that has gradually wasted its reserves. It does not take much to rise to the top in a party that is scraping the barrel and scraping the bottom in the polls.
“We must not let in daylight upon the magic,” the Victorian journalist Walter Bagehot wrote of the British monarchy. “We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all combatants; she will become one combatant among many.” Bagehot’s English Constitution (1867) remains the best field guide to the British system. Perhaps the Conservatives should have taken his advice when it came to this summer’s six-week leadership contest to replace former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. As the economy slid rapidly south, the candidates denounced one another’s records, even though they had served in the same Cabinets and defended each other’s policies. Instead of acting in the national interest, they were grandstanding in their personal interests.
It is unclear whether Johnson needed replacing in the first place. He was not brought down by a general election or the votes of his party’s membership. He was brought down by the votes of his MPs. This is all very Bagehot. In Britain, the prime minister is nominated by the parliamentary party, not selected by the grassroots. It is also all very Thatcher. She, too, was stabbed in the back by her MPs. Like Thatcher, Johnson had given many of his MPs their seats. In 2019, he won the biggest Conservative majority since Thatcher in 1987. Yet, as with Thatcher, a majority of the parliamentary Conservatives had come to fear that their greatest asset was becoming an electoral liability.
The parliamentary Conservatives did not ditch Johnson in the national interest. They did not even do it in their party’s interest. They did not consult the Conservative membership when they fired Johnson in early July. If they had asked, they would have been told that Johnson was still the membership’s choice. So, they did not ask. But the membership would decide who would replace him in early September.
The most the parliamentary party could do was rig the short list. The inside candidate was Rishi Sunak, whose resignation as chancellor of the exchequer had signaled the end of Johnson’s premiership. In August, when the polls showed the membership preferring Penny Mordaunt, who has an unconvincing ministerial record but thumps the tub of Thatcher-style patriotism with impressive conviction, Sunak’s supporters in the right-leaning press successfully deflated Mordaunt’s candidacy.
The word in Westminster was that Sunak’s team knew he would lose to a red-blooded Thatcherite populist such as Mordaunt. Their preferred opponent was Truss, who is an unsteady debater of unsteady principles. Truss entered politics as an activist for the Liberal Democrats. In a 1994 address to the Liberal Democrats, the teenage Truss called the monarchy “disgraceful” and even proposed abolishing it. In 2016, she campaigned against Brexit, the cause which, second to the monarchy, might be dearest to the Conservative members’ hearts.
Sunak, meanwhile, had campaigned for Brexit in 2016. Since then, he has been an articulate advocate of “Global Britain,” the dream of making post-Brexit Britain a “Singapore on the Thames.” This is not entirely fanciful. Geographically and economically, Britain now floats between two larger powers, the United States and the European Union. Britain’s financial services industry remains world-class. The City of London is already an attractive alternative to the EU, and it has excellent links with Asia, too. Add a dose of Thatcherite deregulation, and Britain could become a giant, cold, and rainy version of those Caribbean islands that specialize in offshore banking, a middleman for the world’s money.
Sunak is a product of this post-imperial, post-Thatcherite England. The child of Indian immigrants from East Africa, he was head boy at Winchester College, a boarding school whose pupils are notorious for thinking themselves even cleverer than the boys from Eton College. He went on to the University of Oxford, and then into finance via an MBA at Stanford University, where he met and married Akshata Murty, the daughter of one of India’s richest men. It doesn’t get much more Global Britain.
It turns out that too much Global Britain can be a bad thing. Sunak, it emerged, had held on to his U.S. green card while serving as chancellor of the exchequer. He and his family had saved as much as 20 million pounds ($25 million) in taxes by claiming non-domiciled status. This was entirely legal, but Sunak had also been the chancellor who told the British that he had no choice but to raise their taxes to the highest level since Elizabeth became queen. Now, as candidate for prime minister, he was advocating a high-tax austerity regime to pay down the COVID-19 debt.
Sunak’s final blunder was to wear a pair of Prada loafers costing 450 pounds to a photo opportunity on a construction site. Truss let it be known that her earrings cost her 4 pounds and 50 pence, a sum that just happens to be exactly a hundredth of Sunak’s shoes. When it came to the budget, however, it was Truss who was the big spender. She promised to cut taxes and spend heavily on subsidies, including on energy bills. This recipe offered the Conservative membership more hope at the next elections than Sunak’s vision of endless belt-tightening. And if Sunak’s city-boy suits and complex finances looked more “globalist” than global, Truss looks and sounds solidly “Middle England.”
The Conservative membership chose Truss, 57.4% to 42.6%. This was the narrowest margin ever in a Conservative leadership contest, so it cannot be seen as a full-throated endorsement. As Britain unsteadily enters the third Carolean age, it also stumbles into the age of “Trussonomics.” Elizabeth’s reign saw the diminution of Britain’s capacity to act independently in the world. Can Truss act independently now in a global economy?
“It’s a very challenging situation,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University professor of economics who chairs the university’s study of international economics. “We’re still in the pandemic economy, in a way. Inflation shock, particularly in the United States, is at least in part due to too much stimulus coming too late in the pandemic. The pandemic was worse than the financial crisis in many ways, and it has hit every country in the world.”
Political leaders, Rogoff said, underestimated the nature of the COVID-19 “supply shock” and how long it would take for the global economy to stabilize: “In the complex modern economies, it can take a long time for a supply shock to work its way through the system.” Increases in the price of gasoline, energy, and food were expected, but they were also expected to stop rising and fall back quickly. “One thing we’re now learning is that there are second-round, third-round, fourth-round effects as these costs work their way through other sectors of the economy.”
A “cascade” of consequences and effects, Rogoff said, is now playing out and will continue to do so for a while in both politics and the economy. The pandemic had a “catalyzing” effect on Russia and China. It rendered the Chinese system “fragile,” with “draconian lockdowns and weakness in real estate markets.” It “exacerbated Russia’s economic weaknesses, possibly bringing forward Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.” Add tensions over Taiwan and there is an “extraordinarily precarious situation.” It may take another “two years” for the supply shock on prices to play out, Rogoff suspected. “We may be only halfway through it, even if oil stays where it is now.”
Rogoff said he believes that the EU’s economic prospects and energy supply problems are worse than the United Kingdom’s, but Brexit or no Brexit, that will be “cold comfort, so to speak,” this winter. “The energy shocks are hitting the U.K.’s major trading partner, the EU, and we’re not anywhere near the end game. Even if Ukraine ‘wins,’ you’re still left with a very volatile, dangerous situation.” Energy prices will remain high and fickle. The pandemic has made it harder to do business. Trade with China is “much less efficiency-enhancing than it was” and also politically contentious. “These factors create inflation and lower growth.”
There is, Rogoff said, no pleasant solution. “The answer to supply shocks is structural reform, period. There’s no other answer. There’s no demand solution to supply shocks. That’s what they did in the 1970s. If you prime-pump demand and supply is not going up, you just get more inflation. So Truss’s instinct to cut taxes is understandable, albeit not necessarily sustainable.” But he warned that this alone will not be enough: “Fundamental structural reforms are needed to counter Britain’s long-standing productivity malaise.”
Truss’s challenge is as much electoral as economic. Across the Western democracies, the public mood favors greater government intervention, whether from the Right or the Left. The markets run on optimism, and so does politics. But our politicians are failing to inspire optimism about our economies.
“If you have growth of 2% a year in real terms, then your income is doubling every 36 years. People might be patient with that,” Rogoff said. “Doubling your income takes 72 years if growth is down to 1%. There’s definitely a sense that, as the public has mentally adapted to what seems to be a low-growth world, they are rightly more inclined to say, ‘Well, if things are not getting better, then I want more, a bigger share of the pie, now.’”
We attribute this mood to the financial crisis of 2008, but Rogoff said the root cause is slow growth. Like Charles, Truss has little choice but to step boldly into an uncertain future and try to get the basics right. “In the big picture, the most important thing is to cut deals out of Brexit, keep the financial sector going, and keep the lights on through the winter.”
The British state managed September’s simultaneous transitions, one symbolic, the other practical, with a smoothness that eludes it when planning budgets, roadworks, passport controls, hip replacements, and all the other apparently simpler tasks of government. If you have a medical condition that requires your doctor to sign off on your new driving license, it will be at least six months before you receive the license. If you require an operation or cancer treatment from the National Health Service, prepare to wait much longer — or to die waiting. If, however, you wish to inter a deceased monarch with the traditional fanfare, the machinery of state will carry off an exercise last performed in 1952 with aplomb and precision.
Britain’s problems are less a failure of imagination than state capacity. Johnson came in with plans to modernize the state and went without changing anything. Sunak’s proposals for creating a 21st century state and economy might make sense on paper, but they, like him, are out of sync with the public mood. The economic squeeze is so tight for so many Britons that Truss’s tax-cutting, high-spending proposals carried the day with the Conservative membership.
The bang of the cannon as Elizabeth goes to meet her maker must, by Jan. 25, 2025, be followed by the whimpering of the Conservatives as they face the voters. Truss has started smartly by placing a French-style cap on energy prices. But this alone will not be enough. As the country runs out of energy, the party is running on empty, and Truss is running out of time.
The Conservatives have been in power since May 2010. By January 2025, they will have ruled for more than 14 1/2 years, through four general elections. This span will beat the 13-year, three-election Labour stretch that preceded it, under first Tony Blair (1997-2007) and then Gordon Brown (2007-2010). It would be not much shorter than the British record, the Conservatives’ 18-year, four-election streak under first Margaret Thatcher (1979-1900) and then John Major (1990-1997).
Those three generational sequences, Conservative to Labour to Conservative, have defined British politics from Thatcher’s ascent in 1979 to today. That era covers 43 years of Elizabeth’s 70-year reign. Before 1979, British politics was typified by a cross-party consensus on interventionist policies. Low growth was the price, but social cohesion was the reward. It was not enough of a reward, though. Another hallmark of pre-1979 politics was that the parties rotated power more frequently.
If Truss loses the next election, she will have been prime minister for only two years and 142 days. That would be less than Brown (two years and 318 days) and Johnson (three years and 44 days). Like Charles, she may be remembered as a transitional figure, symbolizing not just a fumbling embrace of the future, but a return to earlier, near-forgotten ages of instability and decline.
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.
