Tomorrow the Conservative Party conference starts in Birmingham. To prepare for it I have been reading one of the most significant political texts of the last decade, a book which I think is essential to understanding the modern British right.
It is Liz Truss’s autobiography, Ten Years to Save the West. Its subtitle is Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room.
It might seem odd to attach quite so much importance to the political memoir of a Prime Minister who lasted 49 days. But look at the policies now being assembled by the Conservatives, Reform and Restore and they are remarkably similar to the programme Truss tried: big tax cuts paid for by shrinking the state and cutting welfare, hostility to Net Zero, much tighter immigration controls and an increasingly assertive social conservatism. Unless something fairly dramatic changes between now and the next General Election, all three parties of the British right are likely to go into it offering different versions of a political programme remarkably similar to the one Liz Truss describes in this book.
Which raises an interesting question. How did the ideas of one of the least successful Prime Ministers in British history become the dominant ideas of the British right?
So I did the difficult thing so that you don’t have to. I read her book.
The establishment insurgent
During a decade in government, Liz Truss moved through seven main ministerial posts — education, environment, justice, the Treasury, international trade, the Foreign Office and finally Downing Street — while also serving as Minister for Women and Equalities.
For somebody who rails against the establishment, this is first and foremost the autobiography of a member of the establishment. Few politicians of her generation were given more opportunities to exercise power. She spent ten years continuously in government, moving from one increasingly important job to another, before eventually becoming Prime Minister.
Yet Ten Years to Save the West frequently reads like the memoir of somebody to whom government happened.
I know people like this.
People who have spent their entire careers climbing ever higher through large bureaucracies while complaining about how awful large bureaucracies are. At every stage they climb another rung up the ladder, become more senior, acquire more power, and become even more convinced that the reason nothing works is the people underneath them. Truss even describes herself as “the human hand grenade”, apparently believing this to be a compliment.
There is very little sense in the book that, after ten years in government, some of the things she complains about might have been her responsibility Instead there is always somebody else. Civil servants. The Treasury. The Bank of England. The OBR. The establishment. The media. The global left. Conservative MPs. The blob.
It is an autobiography remarkably short of sentences beginning: “I was wrong.”
Not Actually a Real Conservative
Truss has particular contempt for CINOs — Conservatives In Name Only. Reading her definition of them, though, I began to wonder whether the book had accidentally identified the wrong suspect.
She describes One Nation Conservatives as people willing to defer to independent institutions and accept prevailing orthodoxies. They worry about radical change and, worst of all, in Truss’s words, “don’t really want any change to the status quo”.
I read that sentence twice. Liz Truss is complaining that members of the Conservative Party are too interested in conserving things. Perhaps we need another acronym. Truss isn’t a CINO. She’s a NARC: Not Actually a Real Conservative.
There is, of course, no single definition of conservatism. Thatcher was very different from Macmillan, who was very different from Disraeli. But there is a long and, in my view, admirable tradition of British conservatism: country before party, good government before ideology, a cool head in a crisis, public service, respect for institutions, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, checks and balances, and above all a scepticism about grand theories promising to remake the world.
It is a philosophy based partly on the fairly sensible observation that the world is complicated and politicians don’t know everything. Truss’s politics are the opposite of that. Institutions are valuable when they agree with her. When they don’t, their disagreement becomes evidence that the institution itself has been captured. The Treasury has moved to the left. Civil servants frustrate Conservative policies. The Bank of England has too much power. Independent institutions defer to a left-wing orthodoxy.
This creates a political philosophy which can never really be proved wrong. If the policy succeeds, the policy was right. If the policy fails, her enemies sabotaged it.
A room full of petrol
Nowhere is this more obvious than in her account of the mini-Budget. There is an important point here on which Truss is right. The pension system really did contain a serious vulnerability involving leveraged Liability Driven Investment funds. Subsequent parliamentary investigation found genuine weaknesses in the system and its regulation.
But then we get one of the most extraordinary admissions in the book. As the crisis developed, Truss says:
“We didn’t fully understand what was happening ourselves.”
She hadn’t heard of LDIs. Apparently most Treasury officials hadn’t either, and the ones who did were ignored. Her government struggled to understand what was happening and struggled to explain it.
Four pages later, however, she has identified the culprit. There is, she concludes, no such thing as “the market” in this context. Instead there are interconnected groups of influential people in the financial establishment talking to one another in a closed feedback loop. It is an extraordinary leap. Even more extraordinary that someone who believes in deregulated free markets doesn’t think that markets actually exist
“We didn’t fully understand what was happening” becomes, within four pages, an explanation of who was to blame for what was happening.
And Truss herself provides the perfect metaphor. She describes her government as having entered “a room full of petrol while carrying a candle”.
Quite.
The existence of the petrol is important. It should have been better regulated. Somebody should have noticed it.But it doesn’t entirely absolve the person carrying the candle.
The mini-Budget announced tax cuts ultimately estimated to reduce government revenues by around £45 billion a year without publishing the accompanying OBR forecast or a broader plan showing how the public finances would be brought under control. The OBR was available to produce a forecast but wasn’t asked to do so. Financial markets reacted immediately, and gilt yields continued rising after Kwarteng suggested that further tax cuts were coming.
This wasn’t simply something that happened at the same time as the mini-Budget. There was a specifically British component to the rise in borrowing costs, and most of those tax cuts were subsequently reversed. Yet the lesson Truss takes from this is overwhelmingly about the institutions around her.
Mandate from whom?
There is another revealing moment in her account of the mini-Budget. Truss dismisses suggestions that she should have proceeded more slowly. Politicians, she says, need to strike while the iron is hot and use their mandate while it is fresh.
But what mandate? Liz Truss hadn’t won a General Election. She had won an internal Conservative Party leadership election. She received 81,326 votes from Conservative members, out of an eligible electorate of 172,437.
That gave her an entirely legitimate mandate to lead the Conservative Party and, under our constitution, to become Prime Minister. It is less obvious that 81,326 Conservative Party members had given her a democratic mandate to make enormous changes to the economic policy of a country of nearly 70 million people.
The political world has become remarkably small.
The small state
Oddly enough, there is one important thing on which I agree with Liz Truss. There is too much government. Where we disagree is about which bits of government we could do without.
I want government to do the things collective action is good at: healthcare, defence, infrastructure, policing, environmental protection, lighthouses. I am much less enthusiastic about government telling people who they can fall in love with, what they can do with their own bodies or how they should live their private lives.
Truss wants to shrink government where it provides services but belongs to a political movement increasingly interested in expanding its reach into culture and private life. Her state isn’t necessarily smaller. It interferes in different places.
There is something very British about our phrase “nosy parker”. We don’t particularly like people poking around in other people’s business. Yet an increasingly large part of the modern right is simultaneously demanding that government get out of our lives and demanding that it intervene in some of the most intimate parts of them.
And there is another problem with the promise of the small state. Where are these enormous easy savings? Conservative governments have spent years looking for them. Welfare has been reformed. Disability benefits have been reformed. Foreign aid has been slashed. Departments have been reorganised and reorganised again. Governments have announced bonfires of quangos, red tape challenges, efficiency drives, spending reviews and civil-service reductions.
The low-hanging fruit isn’t merely gone. It has been picked, put back on the tree and picked again by successive Conservative governments.
What remains is the hard stuff. Healthcare still has to happen. Old people still need pensions. Children still need educating. Roads still need maintaining. The country still needs defending. Sometimes the choice isn’t between the state doing something and nobody doing it. It is between the state doing it and somebody else doing it.
And, as anyone who has looked at the American healthcare system might notice, moving something out of government doesn’t necessarily make it cheaper or less bureaucratic.
The performance of government
One of Truss’s complaints about Downing Street is that it had become obsessed with minutiae. I think she has a point. The example she chooses is wonderful, though. A month after she entered Downing Street, she discovered that a senior Cabinet minister still hadn’t been allowed to appoint a media special adviser because No.10 hadn’t signed it off.
Think about that for a moment. Britain was dealing with the aftermath of Covid, an energy crisis, double-digit inflation and a major European war, and the example chosen to demonstrate the paralysis of the British state is that somebody couldn’t appoint their spin doctor quickly enough.
There is something here about the performance of government. Ministers appearing on television. Ministers announcing initiatives. Ministers demanding action. Ministers giving interviews about how frustrated they are that the machinery of government isn’t doing what they tell it to do. All action and endeavour and intent. All sound and fury. But government is mostly considerably duller than that.
It involves understanding detail, listening to people who know more about a subject than you do, explaining what you’re trying to achieve, carrying people with you and managing change professionally.
You cannot simply stand between reality and the people who understand it and command reality to behave differently.
Stilton
Which brings us, naturally, to Stilton cheese.
One of the most frustrating things about the Brexit debate was the strange way trade was sometimes discussed as though we were still in the 1950s, with proud ministers returning to the House of Commons to announce that Britain had secured tariff-free access for Stilton in return for removing quotas on poppadoms and mango chutney.
Modern trade is considerably more complicated than that. Tariffs matter, but so do standards, rules of origin, regulatory equivalence, services, certification and the boring technical question of whether something legally saleable in Durham can also be sold in Düsseldorf or Tokyo without having to jump through another set of hoops.
I know a little about this because I actually make something and sell it. For my business, the great advantage of the Single Market wasn’t that some politician had negotiated a heroic reduction in the tariff on gin. It was that a bottle of gin made in Durham could be treated as essentially the same product when I sold it elsewhere in the Single Market.
Truss nevertheless tells an excruciating story about selling Stilton cheese to the Japanese. She likes the story so much she tells it twice. I admit that I too find it amusing that Stilton cheese rhymes with Japanese. Although probably not since I was about ten.
The problem isn’t the cheese. It is the persistence of a political idea of trade in which sufficiently determined ministers fly around the world “doing deals”, while the complicated regulatory architecture that actually allows trade to happen becomes boring establishment detail.
It is Brexit as performance rather than trade as reality.
No hinterland
One of the best political autobiographies I’ve read is Denis Healey’s The Time of My Life. It helps that Healey had a more compelling backstory. Any political memoir containing a friendship with Lee Marvin starts with an unfair advantage. But Healey also wrote about something politicians used to call hinterland: the life outside politics.
Politics mattered enormously, but it wasn’t everything. What struck me reading Truss wasn’t what her hinterland consisted of. It was how little hinterland appears in the book at all.
Instead there is politics talking to politics about politics. “Declinists”. “Wokery”. “Anti-growth coalition”. CINOs. It’s the strange language of people who spend too much time talking to other people who speak exactly the same language.
And this, I think, explains something about the modern political right. Social media hasn’t demonstrated that everybody secretly agrees with it. It has allowed people who already agree with one another to find one another, become angry together and eventually mistake their own extraordinarily noisy corner of the internet for the country.
The West didn’t become more socially liberal simply because a cabal of left-wing teachers, civil servants and charities indoctrinated everybody. People changed their minds. Sometimes they changed their minds in response to conservative overreach. Section 28 didn’t make my generation less sympathetic to gay rights. For many of us it did precisely the opposite.
You cannot simply command people to change their minds back.
What exactly are we conserving?
And this brings us back to the only conservative in the room. Traditional conservatism contains an important insight: institutions have value partly because none of us is clever enough to design society from scratch.
That doesn’t mean institutions are always right. The Treasury can be wrong. The Bank of England can be wrong. Civil servants can be wrong. Judges can be wrong. Charities can be wrong. Markets can be wrong. But disagreement with you isn’t evidence of capture. Sometimes the experts really are wrong. And sometimes they’re telling you something you don’t want to hear.
The danger comes when every inconvenient fact is interpreted through ideology. If the OBR disagrees, the OBR is part of the problem. If the Bank disagrees, the Bank has too much power. If civil servants disagree, the blob is resisting. If Conservative MPs disagree, they’re CINOs. If the electorate has become more socially liberal, it has been indoctrinated by the left. Eventually you construct a worldview in which the only possible evidence that you are wrong has already been defined as evidence that you are right.
Margaret Thatcher was an ideological politician, but she was also a formidable political operator embedded in a much older Conservative tradition. Truss takes part of Thatcherism — tax cuts, deregulation, markets — and seems to detach it from much of the institutional conservatism that surrounded it. She is radical where conservatism was cautious. Impatient where conservatism was sceptical. Suspicious of institutions where conservatism traditionally valued them.
And remarkably confident in abstract theory for someone whose book contains the sentence:
“We didn’t fully understand what was happening ourselves.”
Ten years to save what?
Which leaves the most interesting question. If Liz Truss was such a political failure, why are her ideas doing so well? Why, four years after the mini-Budget, are the Conservatives, Reform and Restore converging on programmes containing so many of the same ingredients: lower taxes, a smaller state, welfare cuts, hostility to Net Zero, lower immigration and a more aggressive social conservatism?
There are two possible explanations. Perhaps Liz Truss is an underappreciated political thinker whose ideas have, despite her personal failure, reshaped the British right.
But there is another possibility. Perhaps we’ve got the causation backwards. Perhaps Liz Truss didn’t create Trussism. There is a surprisingly small world surrounding modern right-wing politics: politicians, think tanks, campaign organisations, wealthy donors, commentators and increasingly their American equivalents, circulating the same arguments about tax cuts, deregulation, the administrative state, Net Zero and “woke” institutions. Perhaps Truss was unusually receptive to those ideas and unusually willing to try them.
In which case Ten Years to Save the West is significant, but not quite for the reason its author thinks. It isn’t really the story of the only conservative in the room. It’s the story of how a radical political movement came to call itself conservative.
And perhaps the most revealing sentence in the whole book is still the complaint that some Conservatives “don’t really want any change to the status quo”.
Because after 300-odd pages of Liz Truss explaining what is wrong with modern conservatism, I was left with one fairly basic question.
What, exactly, does the only conservative in the room want to conserve?