All Trussed-up and ‘oven-ready’

The Tory Party may well be in for a roasting under Truss and her Truss-pots, but there’s no point in speculating how it’s all going to turn out. Judging by her various pronouncements at sundry Tory leadership hustings, our new PM seems to have been modelling herself not so much on the Blessed Margaret as on Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, who “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. But we should perhaps pay less attention to what politicians say, and concentrate more closely on what they actually do (or don’t do).

Truss’s first actions as PM have been to appoint the members of her cabinet. Far from being an ‘inclusive’ selection from all parts of her party, it represents an almost complete exclusion of those former ministers who supported Sunak’s leadership bid. More significantly, the new cabinet includes many of ‘the usual suspects’. Truss can hardly claim that this is a ‘new’ government. These are the warmed-over remnants of Johnson’s tired crew. Truss herself has served continuously as a senior minister under all three of her Tory predecessors as PM. She cannot escape collective responsibility for the actions of those governments, from George Osborne’s disastrous austerity drive, through the whole ghastly saga of Brexit and its aftermath, and the mis-steps in dealing with the covid virus pandemic, including the scandals surrounding the improper award of lucrative contracts to Tory cronies. She was one of the nodding donkeys around the cabinet table throughout the entire Whitehall farce.

And so we come to the new Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (a name which does not seem to have been changed, despite Ms Truss having made no mention of “levelling up” in her recent pronouncements). As I predicted only two months ago, Greg Clark’s tenure of this office was destined to be unusually brief. His successor is Simon Clarke, who is the MP for Middlesborough South and East Cleveland. He had previously spent some 18 months in the department, having been a Minister of State (for Regional Growth and Local Government) in what was then ‘De-CLoG’ from 13 February 2020 to 15 September 2021. Clarke has only been in the Commons since 2017, when he won the seat from Labour with a small majority. His majority in 2019 was significantly greater, but this remains a ‘red wall’ seat, which must be at some risk in the next General Election.

New junior ministers in the Ministry will no doubt be appointed in the next day or two.

As to what planning policies the Truss government will pursue, your guess is as good as mine. As I indicated at the beginning of this post, we can’t place much reliance on politicians’ random statements on the subject up to now. We shall just have to wait and see what emerges in practice.

© MARTIN H GOODALL