Liz Truss - Labour’s Secret Weapon

It was not just confined to a front page splash in the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph: the non-existent comeback of Liz Truss has now brought forth a videoed interview for the increasingly alt-right Spectator magazine. Which has done nothing at all for her credibility, or, indeed, that of her interviewers. But the Labour Party will be lapping it up.

Ms Truss sat down for a Q and A with Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who looked at times as if he would rather have been elsewhere, and the magazine’s political editor Katy Balls, who looked no more enthusiastic at the potential hit to her credibility. Ms Truss’ delivery was as wooden as ever, the most obvious questions bringing cringe-inducing not very dramatic pauses.

She was, to no surprise at all, asked about firing Kwasi Kwarteng, who was one of her closest friends. Well, er, um, he was in Washington DC at an IMF meeting, er, um, and she had been warned that there might be a financial meltdown, so, er, um, that’s it. Any regret or empathy anywhere in there? Nope. Not a sausage. And as to regrets for her crashing the economy, well.

“Well, first of all, on the mortgage point, I do want to address this because … we’ve been living in a very low interest rate world, and mortgage rates have been going up and the reason … there was a specific issue around the time, we’re talking about, in September”. Yes? Yes yes? Yes yes yes?

“A lot of it is to do with the liability driven investments, and the impact they had on the markets”. Caused by what and whom? We don’t get to find that out. “So I don’t think it’s fair to blame interest rate rises on what we did, I think that’s unfair”. A big boy did it and ran away. This is total crap. And all it served to accomplish was to convince more of those voters to move as rapidly as possible in the direction of away. Which brings us to opinion polling.

Redfield and Wilton Strategies polled a representative sample of voters on February 5, the day when Ms Truss was splashed across the Tel’s front page, and her intervention was widely discussed during the morning’s politics shows. And the results should make for sobering reading for the Tories.

Labour’s previous poll lead with the same pollster was 21%. Now it was 26%, 4% of which was a further fall in the prospective Tory vote. The former was now on 50% of the popular vote, with the latter on 24%. This would, if translated into an actual General Election poll, leave the Tories on a rump of 52 seats, having lost 313. Labour would gain 305 seats, putting them on a whopping 508, or a Commons majority of 366. The blue wall wouldn’t be.

Those 52 seats would not include any of the Stoke on Trent ones, so Jonathan Gullis would be history. So would Kieran Mullan in Crewe and Nantwich. And 30p Lee in Ashfield. And, indeed, disgraced former Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Heck, a few deals with the Lib Dems could up-end even more Tories.

We would be looking at seats which went Labour in 1997 - like Welwyn Hatfield, currently the domain of Grant “Spiv” Shapps. The Tories could face total wipeout in London. Not since 1931, the era of the National Government, has one party, or group of parties, secured the election of more than 500 MPs. So Keir Starmer must be loving Ms Truss’ interventions.

Things are getting so bad for the Tories that not only is little notice being taken of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle today, but as Owen Jones has noted, there is the distinct possibility that Bozo may return as PM, especially if this year’s round of local elections brings the expected drubbing for the Tories. Being corrupt, inept and congenitally dishonest is suddenly appealing.

So all Labour would need to do would be to remind the electorate at every opportunity of Bozo’s lying, lawbreaking and corruption, as well as his penchant for chasing after younger women while his second wife was battling cancer. Names such as Jennifer Arcuri may be bandied about, as well as all that public money that Bozo appeared to cause to move in her direction.

And all of that is being enabled by Liz Truss’ failure to keep her North and South well and truly buttoned up. The Tories could already have been heading for political oblivion; she has turned the possibility into a racing certainty. And still she can’t help herself. Nor, incredibly, can her pals in the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press.

Liz Truss may cause the Tories to disintegrate. Just rejoice at that news.

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