Second paragraph of third chapter:
The Prime Minister has to be both manager of their team as well as the captain on the pitch. ‘Hero Prime Ministers’ who try to do too much themselves, like Chamberlain in the Munich Crisis or Eden during the Suez Crisis, and who become detached from their Cabinets, become unstuck. This is what happened to Blair over Iraq, or Thatcher over the poll tax at the end of her premiership. Spurned Cabinets will eventually bite the Prime Minister. Hero premiers never end well.
This 384-page book covers the 49 days of Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership in intense detail. It’s the latest in a series of books by Seldon on British Prime Ministers, looking at the qualities which make for good (and bad) leadership, and how Truss’s ascent and downfall illustrate those characteristics.
The fundamental of the story is that Truss launched both a plan to help households with the cost of energy bills, and a bigger plan to cut taxes, without offering any hint about how the books would be balanced, indeed insisting that there would be no cuts to public spending. The Treasury, whose job it is to point these problems out, had been muzzled by the sacking of its chief official on Truss’s first day in office. In her own memoir, Truss is fixated on a particular set of financial instruments that she had never heard of and which started going wrong as the crisis spread, and blames other people for not briefing her.
But the fact is that there was never any plan for funding either the energy payments or the tax cuts, and Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng were completely unable to give a straight answer to the question of where the money would come from, making them look financially illiterate. (Because they were.) The disintegration of the government rapidly followed. Truss blames the ‘deep state’ for her downfall; Seldon sees the problem as ‘deep incompetence’.
One of the headlines from media coverage of the book is that Truss supposedly considered cancelling cancer treatments by the National Health Service. This is not quite reported in the text; on 12 October, the day when reality broke in and the Truss team started frantically looking for £70 billion in savings, Shabbir Memali and Adam Memon, respectively economic advisers to Truss and Kwarteng, told Alex Boyd, Truss’s energy adviser, “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” (Boyd is obviously Seldon’s source.) It’s not a direct quote, barely even an indirect quote; my suspicion is that someone somewhere said, “Oh fuck, £70 billion is what the NHS spends on cancer” and the inference was drawn. Honestly, it’s clear that Truss had no specific ideas at all – which was part of the problem – and would not listen to anyone who told her this could be an issue – which was also part of the problem.
Another part of the problem was her leadership style, and given that Seldon and Meakin’s technique is to interview those close to the action and take those accounts as gospel, this is the part of the book that really does excel, even though I think some of the data could have been queried a bit (more on this tomorrow). In particular, Seldon finds her wanting in the skill of appointing good people and listening to them.
A point he doesn’t dwell on, but that is obvious to even the most casual observer, is that Truss is a very poor communicator. The local radio interviews after her mini-budget were the beginning of the end, really early in the game (29 September, in fact). The final blow, which fell suddenly and unexpectedly, was a completely avoidable breakdown in communications between Truss and her Chief Whip about a House of Commons vote on a relatively minor issue. She’s just not very good at people.
The best bit of writing in the book, however, is about an event that Truss had absolutely no control over: the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Truss had been briefed when she went to Balmoral for her formal appointment as PM that the end was much closer than most people knew. But when the moment came, she and a few aides crowded into the Downing Street flat for Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, to get the news from his palace equivalent, Sir Edward Young. It’s certainly an event that will be remembered much more vividly than any other moment of her premiership.
This is not a perfect book; Seldon has an axe to grind about the extent to which Truss proves or disproves his own theories of good prime minister-ship, and grinds it hard; he takes his sources too seriously; he under-rates the importance of communication as a skill; he is very wrong about Northern Ireland, so wrong that I’m going to write another whole blog post about it. But all in all, it’s an engaging and fascinating account of an extraordinary political car crash, and you can get it here.
