RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: I've been taken aback by the abuse at Liz Truss

2022-09-05

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: I’ve been taken aback by the abuse being chucked at Liz Truss… She has the hide of a rhino and she’s going to need it

This column doesn’t do honeymoon periods. Never has, never will. Politicians have enough cheerleaders. My job has always been to sit at the back and throw bottles.

But even I’ve been taken aback by the abuse being chucked at Liz Truss, before she’s got her feet under the table. Until and unless she screws up spectacularly, she deserves the benefit of the doubt.

We can ignore the moronic Twitter mob, who are dubbing her ‘Thick Lizzy’, a play on the Irish rockers Thin Lizzy.

You don’t get a degree from Oxford University by being thick. Nor do you hold down half a dozen top jobs in government, or become Prime Minister, if you have the IQ of a three-toed sloth.

Admittedly, Fizzy Lizzie lacks razzmatazz when it comes to public speaking. Her acceptance speech yesterday was underwhelming, to say the least. Stirring rhetoric is not her strong point.

‘We will deliver, we will deliver, we will deliver . . .’ sounded like an old vinyl LP with the needle stuck. Either that, or an advert for FedEx. We’re not talking ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ here.

All the main broadcasters are uniformly hostile towards the Tories in general and Fizzy Lizzie in particular

Truss will ultimately be judged on what she does, not what she says or how she says it. But the Boys (and Girls) In The Bubble have written her off already. Don’t be surprised when she arrives in Downing Street today to find Sky’s heckler-in- chief Sam Coates yelling ‘When are you going to resign, Prime Minister?’ before she’s even crossed the threshold of No 10.

Sky’s political editor Eleanor Rigby was more interested yesterday in trying to reopen old wounds between Truss and Penny Mordaunt than concentrating on what comes next.

All the main broadcasters are uniformly hostile towards the Tories in general and Fizzy Lizzie in particular. The BBC wheeled out an unfunny Left-wing ‘comedian’ to ridicule her on the inaugural Laura Kuenssberg Sunday show, which is supposed to be a forum for serious political discussion.

The Beeb’s idea of an ‘impartial’ panel of commentators also contained Labour’s Lady Nugee — aka Emily Thornberry, a devoted Corbynista — and a former Downing Street aide best known for slagging off Boris Johnson.

Over on ITV, stand-in breakfast telly presenter Martin Lewis indulged in a bizarre bout of histrionics during an interview with ex-Tory MP Edwina Currie about cutting heating bills. This is the kind of treatment Truss can expect if she’s ever daft enough to go on Good Morning Britain.

Multi-millionaire Lewis has spent the summer attacking the Government and warning that people are going to die because of the cost of living crisis, in a brazen attempt to drive traffic to his money-spinning website.

Admittedly, Fizzy Lizzie lacks razzmatazz when it comes to public speaking. Her acceptance speech yesterday was underwhelming, to say the least. Stirring rhetoric is not her strong point

With the media ‘elite’ congratulating themselves on seeing off Boris, you don’t need to be Thin Lizzy to be reminded that the Boys Are Back In Town and gunning for our new Prime Minister.

She’s already being monstered over her political voyage from Lib Dem to Tory, and embracing Brexit having campaigned for Remain.

You might have thought that demonstrated an open mind, a willingness to change her opinion when the facts change. Just like Winston Churchill once said.

So what if she was a bit of a Leftie who went on CND demos with her mum and dad when she was younger. How does that old chestnut go: If you’re not a liberal at 20, you’ve no heart, and if you’re not a Conservative by the time you’re 40, you’ve no brain. And as Margaret Thatcher remarked: the facts of life are conservative.

Not that I’m in any way comparing Fizzy Lizzie to Churchill, or Mrs Thatcher, come to that — much as Truss would like to see herself as the reincarnation of Britain’s first female PM. We’ve watched her trying on Thatcher’s pussy-bow wardrobe and posing Cold War-style in a tank. Plenty of commentators have drawn parallels between her and Maggie.

But I think the comparison is well wide of the mark. Yes, Thatcher faced similar obstacles when she became Prime Minister — rampant inflation, widespread industrial unrest, rising energy prices and so on.

Mrs T, though, was handed the task of clearing up a mess of Labour’s making. She had four years in opposition to prepare.

Fizzy Lizzie has been given a hospital pass by her own side. All of the problems she inherits have arisen during 12 years of Conservative Government, albeit five years in coalition with the Lib Dems.

Admittedly, the global energy crisis is a result of Putin’s war on Ukraine. But it has been exacerbated by complacency and inaction by our own Government, a failure to build nuclear power stations and the ban on fracking especially.

In the early years of Call Me Dave’s administration that was largely to appease his coalition partners. Clegg thought nuclear wasn’t worth the bother and his Lib Dem energy secretary Ed Davey — now the party’s leader — still boasts about putting the kibosh on shale gas extraction by setting ludicrously low limits on possible tremors.

Truss will also have to find the courage to face down militant union leaders, trying Scargill-style to use their industrial muscle to topple a democratically elected Government

Boris’s weird obsession with Net Zero has only made things worse.

Tackling the scandalously high price of energy is the most immediate challenge on her ‘to do’ list. So is the runaway cost of living, soon to breach double figures. None of this is ultimately insurmountable. We’ve been here before, in the 1970s, and survived and prospered.

We will discover soon enough her proposed solutions. Until then, I’m willing to reserve judgment.

There are other pressing problems which must be addressed as a matter of urgency. Public services are a shambles, largely because of the continued refusal of the Civil Service to resume normal working.

Instead of selling off ‘surplus’ office space in Whitehall and elsewhere, she should — as this column has been suggesting for nearly two years — do a Ronald Reagan and tell anyone still insisting on ‘working from home’ that unless they get back to their desks sharpish they will be sacked.

Truss will also have to find the courage to face down militant union leaders, trying Scargill-style to use their industrial muscle to topple a democratically elected Government. Thatcher succeeded in doing just that, so it shouldn’t prove impossible given iron will. She might start by reminding the wider public that none of those workers — not on the railways, in the Post Office or the Civil Service — striking for higher pay lost a penny in wages during Covid.

Whatever sympathy those strikers have now would soon evaporate.

Whoever becomes Home Secretary will have to get tough with the police and insist they start doing the job they are paid for, instead of jumping on every passing woke bandwagon and dancing the Macarena at Pride rallies.

They will also have finally to halt illegal immigration, particularly from Albania, despite entrenched obstructionism from the Blob and the yuman rites brigade.

Is Truss up to the task? Only time will tell. I have no idea. Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Johnson were all known quantities. But I have to admit that until now Truss has rarely popped up on my radar, despite having held several senior Cabinet jobs.

Yes, there are superficial similarities with Mrs Thatcher, but the PM Truss most reminds me of is Johnny Major. He, too, was largely an unknown quantity when he emerged from the pack to become PM. Like Truss, he wasn’t the initial frontrunner. That was Heseltine, who everyone assumed would take over from Maggie.

Major went missing during the assassination, pleading an urgent dental appointment to extract a troublesome wisdom tooth. I spent years trying to track down his dentist, but drew a blank.

While Boris was being knifed, Fizzy Lizzie was conveniently out of the country on Foreign Office business. Like Major, she remained loyal to the PM until the end.

Thatcher faced similar obstacles when she became Prime Minister — rampant inflation, widespread industrial unrest, rising energy prices and so on

Curiously, she also had an affair with another Tory MP, just like Major who enjoyed a celebrated dalliance with Edwina Currie (see above). Fortunately, in her case, we have been spared the gory details — such as who sat with their back to the taps in the bath.

Truss, like Major, enters 10 Downing Street at the fag end of a long period of Conservative Government. Once again the Tory party is bitterly divided, as it was in 1990, when a popular PM with an unblemished record of electoral success was deposed by jittery and quarrelsome MPs.

Labour, as now, enjoyed a comfortable lead in the opinion polls. Neil Kinnock thought all he had to do was sit back and wait for victory to fall into his lap.

Received opinion was that Major wouldn’t cut the mustard. Yet less than two years later he won the general election with a record number of votes and governed for another five years before Labour’s 1997 landslide.

Can Fizzy Lizzie repeat the trick? We shall see. Those who have worked closest with her say she has the determination to make a success of it, despite all the odds being stacked against her and the open hostility of the majority of the political and media class.

Yesterday, in a rare outbreak of impartiality, the BBC interviewed some of the so-called Turnip Taliban, Conservative members in her Norfolk constituency.

They were confident she could pull it off. When she decides on a task, she sticks to it, they assured us. Asked about her greatest quality, one replied: ‘She has the skin of a rhinoceros.’

She’s going to need it.

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