A prime minister must get the big calls right. On the cost of living crisis, Truss got it badly wrong
It should have been Liz Truss’s moment of triumph, her chance to bask in the glory of a whooping crowd.
Yet victory, when it came, felt curiously flat. Gone was the bouncy, confident, shoot-from-the-hip Truss who emerged over two long months of hustings, after a wobbly start. When Britain’s new prime minister rose to the lectern to embrace a narrower win over Rishi Sunak than expected – narrow enough to make you wonder if he could even have won, had he played it differently – the old, slightly flat, stilted speaking manner was back. In Truss, that’s a sure sign of nerves. Perhaps only now does she feel the weight of what lies ahead.
When loyal Tories struggle for nice things to say about Boris Johnson, they often fall back on claiming that at least he got the big calls right. That cliche may be hard to square with the chaotic reality of his time in office, but they reach for it because the absolute minimum expected of a prime minister is that they inspire confidence in a crisis. When the proverbial hits the fan, we all have to hope their gut instincts will be right, whatever else we disagree with them over. What’s unusual about Truss is that her first move on taking office will effectively be to acknowledge that at the start of her leadership campaign she got the big call wrong.
She won’t put it that way, obviously, when she addresses the nation on Tuesday. But however valiantly she now tries to rewrite history, the fact remains that she horribly misjudged the cost of living emergency at first, insisting it could be handled merely with tax cuts and scrapping the green levy on fuel bills. Thankfully she now seems to have been persuaded that a much bigger and more direct intervention will be needed, and if the mooted £100bn
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