A competent speaker, she's not.
Neither Starmer nor Truss are competent at anything to do with performing in public. But that is not the point of the exercise!
But she got the first rule of governing right - never waste a crisis. She launched a “bazooka” of Government spending to deal with the energy crisis. But the billions of pounds of public money she is using to hose-down energy bills would make Gordon Brown dizzy!
The scale of the public money used to ensure lower energy bills is hard to comprehend. It is nothing less than a reset of UK energy policy, which Truss said had been failed by “decades of short-term thinking” (note the plural, to avoid admitting it was a Tory mistake - which of course it was!)
The idea now is that the UK will become a net energy exporter by 2040, while the net zero emissions target by 2050 is now under review - sounds ominous!
Truss said: “This is the moment to be bold. We are facing a global energy crisis and there are no ‘cost-free’ options. There will be a cost to this intervention.”
That is an understatement, with some forecasts suggesting
it will cost the UK £200billion.
The spending appears to lack a ceiling and our interconnectors to the Continent mean we are paying the price for Germany's almost total reliance on Russian gas. How long will it be before some Tory MPs on the Right starts to call for the interconnectors to be switched off?
If nothing else, Truss’s spending has bought her a political honeymoon of sorts,
with tens of billions of pounds piled on our national debt. And that is highly inflationary in the long run. Just the interest payments on the national debt are now costing the exchequer half as much as the entire NHS budget - and that is going to rise as it is linked to RPI.
Now add to all that the tax cuts to be announced by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng within a fortnight. The Treasury’s eyes will be on the financial markets, as the growing weakness of the pound against the dollar and the Euro is adding to inflationary pressures.
But the markets want to see Truss cutting public spending, alongside today’s energy bailout. That is where it gets difficult. As Truss’s former rival Rishi Sunak found when he tackled the Covid crisis in early 2020: spending public money is easy; turning off the taps is something else entirely.
Summed up -
her present basket of measures is extremely inflationary. More government spending paid for with even more borrowing. A child of two could work out that is one hell of a turkey and it ain't gonna fly far!
The upshot is that this government is going to enter the next general election in the teeth of a full-blown stagflationary depression.
By close I mean knowing the list of new ministers 24 hours before the rest of the world. I'm told there is a great deal of unease amongst many influential Conservatives and Truss's chance of survival are very, very slim.
