How the Tories Lost Britain

Liz Truss has a theory about what caused the collapse of Britain’s Conservative Party, and it has little to do with her. Sitting last May in her corner office across the street from Big Ben, Truss diagnosed the multiple ailments of her party, without referring to her own calamitous, 49-day stint as prime minister. Instead, like the London Eye turning lazily on the far bank of the Thames outside her window, she spun a story about how the Conservatives had drifted away from their ideological moorings.

Mass migration, big government, anticapitalist protests, an erosion of Parliament’s power over the “deep state” and a hothouse legal culture that prizes transgender rights over common-sense policies — these and other nostrums of left-wing thinking had come to dominate British politics, she said. After 14 years in power, Truss went on, the Conservatives were still living in, even embracing, Tony Blair’s Britain.

“We’re still seeing gender ideology in schools; we’ve got record levels of immigration; our taxes are at an 80-year high; and the government accounts for 45 percent of G.D.P.,” she said, in her characteristic staccato tone. “By any objective measure, that’s not a very strongly conservative set of policies.

“I tried,” Truss said of her ill-fated premiership, the shortest in Britain’s history, “but it was too late in the day, fundamentally.”

Never mind that Truss was ultimately undone by her own policies: an ill-judged foray into Ronald Reagan-style, trickle-down tax cuts that frightened the financial markets, sent the British pound into a tailspin and provoked the kinds of warnings about financial instability from the International Monetary Fund normally issued to rogue regimes in Latin America.