British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s time at 10 Downing Street may be over before she has time to plan a housewarming party.
Senior members of the prime minister’s Conservative Party are reportedly planning a meeting Monday to discuss the next steps for the party after her economic plan of tax cuts and deregulation imploded.
Nearly two dozen former Cabinet ministers and disgruntled Conservative members of Parliament are holding what has been billed as a “dinner of grown-ups” to discuss whether to replace Ms. Truss as prime minister, barely more than a month after she herself took office to replace the scandal-plagued Boris Johnson.
Truss backers saying ditching her now would be electoral suicide for the Conservatives, who already trail far behind the opposition Labour Party in polls after a decade in power.
But Conservative MPs, many of whom opposed her in the divisive summer leadership battle to succeed Mr. Johnson, say the ditching of her signature tax-cutting economic program and the abrupt firing last week of new Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng have left her authority in tatters.
New Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt has already signaled he thinks Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng went “too far, too fast” and said he would propose tax hikes and spending cuts to ease inflation fears and calm financial markets that have sent the value of the pound plunging.
“She is in the departure lounge now and she knows that,”an unnamed former Tory minister told the Guardian newspaper. “It is a case now of whether she takes part in the process and goes to some extent on her own terms, or whether she tries to resist and is forced out.”
In an unusual move for a special ally, President Biden piled on over the weekend on the campaign trip to Oregon, telling reporters Saturday he had deep doubts about Ms. Truss’ first “mini-budget” and its likely contribution to rising global inflation.
Mr. Biden said it was “predictable” that the new prime minister’s program of unfunded tax cuts would rattle financial markets, an unusually blunt intrusion by a U.S. president in an ally’s domestic policies.
“I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,” Mr. Biden said. “I disagree with the policy, but that’s up to Great Britain.”
Ms. Truss’s status is so shaky that Mr. Hunt, who is preparing a program of fiscal austerity that sharply contrasts with the government’s original plan, was forced to say explicitly he believed she was still in charge of her own Cabinet.
“She’s listened, she’s changed, she’s been willing to do that most difficult thing in politics which is to change tack,” he told the BBC in an interview..
The infighting reflects the fact that Ms. Truss proved more popular with the Conservative Party grassroots than with many of her colleagues in Parliament. The Parliamentary faction had leaned toward former Treasury Rishi Sunak, the runner-up in the race to succeed Mr. Johnson and the one candidate who argued Britain’s fiscal position did not allow it to pursue stimulative tax cuts at this time.
Political handicappers in London say anti-Truss forces are weighing ways to get around a rule blocking a new leadership fight for the first year of Ms. Truss’s tenure, including a no-confidence campaign in a bid to force party bosses into a rule change, or allowing sitting MPs to bypass the party membership in the country and pick a new leader themselves.
Top Labour Party officials have quickly seized on the confusion in the government’s camp.
“I’m not even sure what this government’s economic policy is at the moment,” Labour Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the BBC over the weekend. “I don’t know which bits of the budget still apply, and I don’t know what we will hear next week.”
• David R. Sands can be reached at dsands@washingtontimes.com.
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