Will Liz Truss keep her promises?

It’s surely all over bar the shouting, said Sebastian Payne in the FT. With recent surveys of Conservative Party members putting Liz Truss more than 30 points ahead of her leadership rival Rishi Sunak, the Foreign Secretary appears to be “on a glide path to Downing Street”.

Truss has proved a canny player of Tory internal politics, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. While Sunak alienated many Tory members by moving against Boris Johnson, she has highlighted her loyalty. And she has been telling the Tory faithful exactly what they want to hear, promising early tax cuts and playing down talk of recession. Sunak has become the “actually it’s a bit more complicated than that” candidate as he has laboured to pick holes in her arguments. “Anyone who remembers how that ended for Remainers in 2016, or Hillary Clinton up against Donald Trump, will have insight into why Truss has been wiping the floor with him.”

Things will get a lot more complicated for Truss if she does indeed succeed Johnson as PM next month, said Jessica Elgot in The Guardian. For while the Tory members who are deciding this race through a postal ballot may be lapping up her talk of tax cuts, many of her colleagues are highly sceptical of “Trussonomics”.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Given that she would already be entering Downing Street without the backing of a majority of Tory MPs, these party divisions could soon cause her all sorts of trouble. Truss’s policies don’t seem all that popular with the wider electorate either, said The Times. In a new Ipsos-Mori poll, 64% of voters, and 68% of Tory voters, said the priority should be tackling inflation, not offering tax cuts. The public is right to be suspicious of Truss’s brand of what Sunak has dubbed “fairytale economics”. By choosing a PM who appeals to their own narrow interests, Tory Party members “risk losing the next election”.

Don’t take any of Truss’s current promises too literally, said John Rentoul on The Independent. The record of the former anti-monarchist Liberal Democrat and centrist pro-Remain Tory shows that she is not afraid of abandoning positions if they get in the way of her quest to get ahead. If and when she wins the leadership campaign, she’ll swiftly change tack. The pressure to provide more targeted help to voters through what she now dismisses as “handouts”, rather than through tax cuts that would be of no help to vulnerable pensioners and benefit claimants, would be impossible to resist. Truss will no doubt soon switch and co-opt “all the positions that Sunak has been trying unsuccessfully to sell” to Tory members. A pivot is coming. “The only question is how skilfully she makes the transition.”