With British Government in Peril, Liz Truss Jets to Prague

The new British prime minister, Liz Truss, may have no more than ten days to save her badly ailing government from collapse, yet will fly to the Czech capital on Thursday to attend an eclectic, inaugural parley on European comity convened by the persnickety French president, Emmanuel Macron.The timing is either good or awful, coming as it does on the heels of a disappointing four-day Conservative party conference at Birmingham. London’s Daily Express reported that some British parliamentarians are openly saying that Ms. Truss has “ten days to save her premiership.”What has gone so wrong, so fast? Ms. Truss assumed office a month ago, on September 6, but the pace of global events and war in Ukraine tends to obscure the fact that she won the Tory party election and entered Downing Street only after other Tories showed her predecessor, Boris Johnson, the door. Yet the Telegraph reports that Ms. Truss has a “net favorability rating of -59,” which is four points lower than the worst such rating held by the discredited former Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn. No wonder that one of that newspaper’s columnists implores, “Come back, Boris — all is forgiven.”Even so, Ms. Truss on Monday penned an article in the Telegraph in which she defended the economic policies that are already making her deeply unpopular. In that article she blamed rising interest rates on “the crisis caused by Vladimir Putin’s appalling war and Covid.” Her response has been to push through deregulation and aggressive tax-cutting in the service of what she says will be growth, but markets have seemed less sure. After her speech yesterday at Birmingham, the pound fell two percent, Barron’s reported, to $1.12.That was still an improvement following the pound’s tumble to a record low of $1.03 soon after Truss announced a stimulus package that includes $50 billion in tax cuts to be paid for by government borrowing on September 23. After that, the Bank of England was forced to prop up the bond market and stop a wider economic crisis.Britain’s economic house, in other words, is a long way from optimum working order. Even a leading Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, chirps that “someone is already talking about a return of Boris Johnson.” Yet while Mr. Johnson, energized by a sybaritic summer spell in Greece, may be waiting in the wings, it is one of his staunchest allies who may step in if Ms. Truss’s sputtering cabinet collapses. That is the defense secretary, Ben Wallace, who many wags thought would toss his hat into the ring after Mr. Johnson’s exit. Mr. Wallace, though, has been busy managing with a quiet but firm hand Britain’s support of Ukraine. Now, according to the Daily Express, Tory MPs are ready to see Mr. Wallace step in as “emergency prime minister.”Ms. Truss, for her part, has some choppy waters to navigate. She has had to explain, with limited success, why she wheeled on nixing a “45p” upper rate of income tax. A former Labor prime minister said that cutting benefits would cause “a national uprising.” Even one of her own cabinet ministers, Penny Mordaunt, has joined a rebellion — led by Tory party stalwart, Michael Gove — against Ms. Truss’s plans for welfare cuts. It gets worse. The British band M People was “livid” that Ms. Truss used without their permission one of their songs as she took to the stage at Birmingham. Then the Guardian newspaper kindly suggested that “Liz Truss spoke as a PM in denial, watched by a party that knows she’s a failure.”With enthusiasm like that at London, Prague probably sounds like a pretty nice respite from the storm. Or maybe not. When she was running for leadership of the Conservative party, Ms. Truss snubbed Mr. Macron, saying that the jury was out on whether the Frenchman could be counted as a “friend or foe.” That prompted Mr. Macron to retort, “If the French and British are not capable of saying whether we are friends or enemies — the term is not neutral — we are going to have a problem.”The utility of the meeting to launch a so-called European Political Community is a question for another day. Yet certainly the Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans they are seeing as we write will be glad for a British presence, given their belief that, as the Telegraph put it plainly, “Britain provides better security guarantees in the face of Russian aggression than the majority of EU members, including France and Germany.”Should Ms. Truss have canceled? It is all but certain the knives will be out at Westminster while she is away. Labor already smells blood, though a national election is probably at least a year away. Meantime an unstable Britain is in nobody’s interest, except possibly the Kremlin’s.

With British Government in Peril, Liz Truss Jets to Prague

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