As Britain’s 56th prime minister, the country’s fourth in the past six years and the third woman to occupy the office, Liz Truss will need all the skills she can muster to lead her people out of the formidable crises they currently face. Truss has, unfortunately, not had a reputation for accommodation and has sometimes even seemed rather abrasive in her dealings with people.
On Monday, when the results of the Conservative Party leadership contest put her ahead of her rival, though with a not very significant 57% plus, she marched triumphantly onto the stage to speak of her plans for Britain. On the way to the stage, though, she ignored Rishi Sunak, who was sitting a chair away from her.
With many people expecting her to shake Sunak’s hand, her attitude of walking past him and then repeating the exercise after she finished her remarks (though after a few words of perfunctory praise for him on stage) -- when she walked out of the room without so much as a glance at her beaten rival -- was rather disconcerting.
The scene was in marked contrast to the moment when Boris Johnson defeated Jeremy Hunt for the party leadership a few years ago once Theresa May had decided to resign as prime minister. Johnson and Hunt warmly shook hands, the latter congratulating him effusively on his victory. That was a cheering moment, a pointer to long-held British tradition. It was tradition not on display in London on Monday.
Liz Truss, in her victory speech, was unable to set out a vision as Britain’s new leader. She went somewhat overboard in showering praises on her outgoing predecessor, at one point commending his efforts in what she called crushing Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader. Those remarks were pretty grating to the ear.
In Western political tradition, at least in modern times, it is the expectation that men and women who rise to the highest office in the land demonstrate magnanimity toward their opponents at home and abroad. Liz Truss came across as a new Cold Warrior. Her hostility toward Russia -- and one recalls her disastrous meeting as foreign secretary with Sergey Lavrov in February in Moscow -- has deepened.
All said and done, though, it will be on the domestic front that the new prime minister will find herself sorely tested. Inflation is high and costs of living have been going up in leaps and bounds. Tax issues are a prime concern for Truss, who her supporters have said will hit the ground running. That will call for swift policy-making and even swifter implementation.
The Ukraine crisis, and especially the sanctions imposed on Russia, have begun to boomerang on the West. Vladimir Putin’s decision to suspend the Nord Stream gas supply to Europe has caused a new headache for the West. Joe Biden has referred to the Russian move as blackmail. The Germans and the French have gone for quick belt-tightening measures in light of the Putin decision.
In effect, the snowballing crisis caused by the Ukraine war will be a challenge for Britons under Liz Truss. She has pledged to deliver on the promises she has made but has been rather vague on the ways she means to go about doing it. At a time when the opposition Labour is ahead of the Tories in opinion polls and the Lib Dems look forward to electoral gains in the near future, the new government under Truss will have to devise an immediate strategy of reassuring the public that pragmatism will be its modus operandi in office.
There is too the threat of a new referendum for Scottish independence from Nicola Sturgeon, with whom Truss has not had the best of relations.
Sage advice for Liz Truss has been forthcoming. That she should abjure thoughts of leading a government comprised of her supporters and instead bring in what essentially would be a team of rivals has not been well received, judging by the early appointments to her cabinet. It does not bode well for her leadership. Sunak is not there and neither are those who backed him for 10 Downing Street.
The difficulty for British political observers is that, for all the ministerial jobs she has held in the last decade, Truss has essentially been unprepared for leadership at the top. And yet the top job is now hers. Perhaps she will grow in office, perhaps she will not. It all depends on her mastery of domestic politics and foreign policy issues. It depends on her ability to reach out to those who do not see eye to eye with her.
Liz Truss takes charge of Britain at a time when global politics is on a nosedive, indeed has been for months. Within Britain, railway, bus and tube strikes have been gaining in frequency and momentum in the last few months. The National Health Service is in crisis; and energy bills are rising for households, with predictions being made of Britain up against the possibility of a long, cold, bleak winter in the coming weeks.
These are enormous challenges for any leader. For someone as new as Truss at 10 Downing Street, these just could be enough to push the government into a quagmire. The new cabinet under Truss has therefore an unenviable job on its hands.
Prime Minister Truss will need to reassure Britons on another front. For all her praise of and loyalty to Boris Johnson, she will have to stake out an independent course for herself. Again, she must avoid the sniping and the inner divisions which undermined Johnson’s government from within. With her model of leadership being Margaret Thatcher, demands will be made of Truss’ measuring up to the decisiveness the Iron Lady demonstrated in her time.
With a majority of Tory MPs earlier making clear that they preferred Sunak over her for the prime minister’s office, Truss knows she is -- and will be -- on weak ground if ingenuity does not come into play in her demonstration of leadership. Besides, with as much as 43% of Conservative Party members voting for Rishi Sunak in the leadership contest, Truss knows the ground she stands on is not hard enough for her to stamp her mark on party and national politics.
On assuming office as Britain’s prime minister in 1868, Benjamin Disraeli let out the confession, half in jest and half in seriousness: “Yes, I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.”
On that greasy pole in recent times three of Liz Truss’ predecessors have slipped. It will now be for her to show she can hang on there, at the top, at least for the two years before Britons next go to an election.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.