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Good morning. Liz Truss is off to Balmoral in Scotland to see the Queen and become prime minister, before returning to London to address the nation. The big items in her agenda this week: form a government and unveil her proposals to tackle the energy crisis. Some thoughts on the latter in today’s note, while I’ll address the former tomorrow.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com.
It’s a Cin
Boris Johnson has left Downing Street in much the same way he resigned as Conservative party leader eight weeks ago: whining and complaining and generally making a spectacle of himself.
Part of the spectacle was comparing himself to Cincinnatus, the Roman politician who saved Rome, left politics and then came back for a second stint. Will Johnson be back?
It’s certainly possible. The main reason that he was forced out is that he had become so unpopular in the country at large that he was dragging the Conservative party down. However, the myth of his popularity is still strong among the Conservative press and has grown during the race to replace him. One measurement of that is how the attitudes of party members towards Rishi Sunak’s resignation changed during the contest. Here’s the key chart from YouGov:
Easy to see how Boris Johnson comes back: the overlapping crises facing the UK state will almost certainly make Liz Truss and the Conservative party more unpopular in six months than they are today, and nervous Tory MPs in marginal seats decide they can live with Johnson’s shortcomings because he is still their best electoral asset.
As it is, I think it’s unlikely for the same reason that Boris Johnson leaves office having achieved close to nothing with power: I think Johnson is simply too lazy to mount a second comeback. He’ll use his inevitable column in a rightwing newspaper to make mischief and he’ll occasionally hint at a return, but I just don’t think he is going to have the organisation or the gumption to do the required work for it, just as he lacked the wherewithal to do anything with his final weeks in office.
Supporting households is only the start
That said: the situation facing Liz Truss is really really bad, so anything could happen.
The question of what you need to do is easy simply because it’s obvious that the cost of energy is rising to well past the point that most households and businesses can afford to bear it. The University of York’s Social Policy Research Unit estimates that 78.1 per cent of households will be in fuel poverty by January (that is, by spending more than 10 per cent of their income on heating their homes) and 45.9 per cent of households will be spending more than a fifth of their income. More than 82 per cent of pensioner couples and 90 per cent of couples with at least four children will be in fuel poverty.
From a political perspective, this is not a head-scratcher: there is no prospect of any government being re-elected if close to eight in 10 households are in fuel poverty and frankly at that point the real risk of social unrest and other knock-on effects are also pretty high. So that’s the easy part.
But as Chris Giles, Nathalie Thomas and Jim Pickard set out in this handy explainer, while the “what do you need to do?” is straightforward, the “how do you do it, and how do you afford it?” part of the question is quite difficult.
Get that right and you still have another problem. The pressures on households and businesses aren’t being caused because the energy bosses have decided they want to make a lot of money this year. Rather, as Martin Sandbu sets out in an excellent column, it is because Russian president Vladimir Putin has disrupted the energy market as a tactic to force the rest of Europe to accept his attempt to reshape Russia’s borders by force. Energy prices are high because we don’t have enough energy.
The difficulty for Liz Truss is that whatever she does to support households and businesses to avoid bankruptcy and poverty, there is no easy solution to the problem that we don’t have enough energy. In the short term, it’s possible that a big bold energy policy from Truss will mean that she starts her leadership in a strong position politically and that the Conservative party’s poll rating improves. But the reality of rationing and possible energy shortages suggest to me that advantage is likely to be shortlived.
Someone who agrees with that assessment is Sir Keir Starmer. The Labour leader addressed his MPs last night, and amid the boilerplate we-are-the-future-now-have-you-noticed-the-public-realm-is-in-a-right-state that is the bread and butter of any successful Labour opposition, I was struck by his argument that Truss’s poll ratings will probably improve in the short term. That seems about right to me — with the big question of whether Truss will be able to use that period of political power to do something that pays dividends in the life of this parliament.
Now try this
I gave The Rings of Power a whirl: it’s alright. I also wrote a weekend essay about the enduring appeal of JRR Tolkien’s world.
More than alright is There’d Better Be A Mirrorball, the first single in the Arctic Monkeys’ new record, The Car.
Top stories today
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Restless party | One of the first major challenges for Liz Truss will be to shore up her position among the party’s 357 MPs, a majority of whom did not support her leadership bid. Will the prime minister be able to govern her own party?
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Sterling at weakest level | The pound hovered yesterday near its weakest level in decades in a sign of faltering investor sentiment in UK markets as Liz Truss prepares to take the reins as prime minister.
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Hawkish official urges rapid action | Catherine Mann, a Bank of England rate-setter, has argued that “fast and forceful” tightening of monetary policy is needed to arrest an upward drift in household and business expectations of inflation over a three-year time horizon.
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