Her grand ambitions to transform Britain’s sluggish economy face three constraints
to replace Boris Johnson as the Tory leader; tomorrow, she will fly to Balmoral Castle, Queen Elizabeth’s remote Scottish home, where she will be invited to form a government.
She saw too the restricted lives of her parents’ acquaintances in communist Poland, and concluded there was something to be said for the freedoms Thatcher preached about. As a teenager, she joined the Liberal Democrats, and then, while studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, she turned to conservatism. Ms Truss’s mother reconciled herself to her daughter’s new career.
Ms Truss is convinced that Britain has room to borrow more and that over the longer term, her policies will reap rewards in the form of higher growth. On the campaign trail she said that Britain’s economy ought to be growing at 2.5% a year; the Office for Budget Responsibility currently expects a growth rate of 1.7% at the end of its forecast horizon.
She will be a more effective administrator than Mr Johnson, although that is a low bar. She is proud of having signed a clutch of deals as trade secretary and of having helped negotiate the release of British hostages in Iran as foreign secretary. Really, both revealed a knack for selling difficult concessions as triumphs. Yet for all her talk of “delivery”, her record of achieving big structural reforms is thin.
To her critics, Ms Truss offers only a mimicry of Thatcherism: all the aesthetics, little of the insight. She may have the furs and the aphorisms, they say, but she abandoned her support for planning deregulation, the single most-obvious supply-side reform, as soon as it became clear that Tory activists wouldn’t wear it. Her pledge to scrap all unnecessarylaws by the end of 2023 may sound reassuringly radical, but it is divorced from the fine-grained work of effective regulation.
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