Everything you need to know about Britain’s next prime minister. By Daniel Hannan.
The ballot of Britain’s Conservative Party members doesn’t close until Sept. 2, with the result to be announced three days later. But Liz Truss will win, probably by a margin of 20 percentage points or more, and become the next British prime minister. If she doesn’t, then I have become so bad at reading the runes that I should probably quit writing. …
First, she is an outsider. Like Margaret Thatcher, Truss was a hardworking girl who made it to the University of Oxford from an ordinary background. …
Second, Truss is a free marketeer. Before being elected, she was deputy director of a think tank called Reform, which focuses on introducing market-friendly mechanisms into Britain’s lumbering public services. …
The thread that runs through Truss’s career is a belief in small government. When she found that, despite the name, the Liberal Democrats had no time for classical liberalism, she switched. Her argument for staying in the EU was that leaving would be a distraction from domestic economic reforms. But once the result came in, she saw it as leading logically to divergence and deregulation. The worst of all worlds, she believed, would be to leave the EU but retain its economic model.
Fourth, Truss can win an election. Boris Johnson brought together the traditional Tory base (southern, affluent, cosmopolitan) and former Labour voters who had switched over the EU policy (northern, working class, socially conservative). Sunak, a former merchant banker who, with his heiress wife, is worth around a billion dollars, struggles to connect with that second group. Truss, on the other, hand, is in with a shot at holding the coalition together. …
Sixth, Truss is America’s dream candidate. Successive U.S. administrations have wanted a Britain that is committed as an ally and ready to spend more on defense. Truss will lead such a Britain. She has, if anything, been more hard-line than Johnson on Ukraine and is strongly committed to Taiwan. Indeed, she is a greater champion of traditional U.S. foreign policy than President Joe Biden, whose signature act was the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
As with Thatcher, she might end up becoming the effective leader of the free world.
Seventh and finally, Truss might just be a second Thatcher. Half a century on, Britain is back where it was in the 1970s. Decline is in the air. Conservatives seem to want to tackle the economic crisis by spending even more. In 1975, the Tories chose an unlikely female leader who overturned the consensus and reversed the decline.
Could it happen again? We’re about to find out.
