Shortly before Christmas, in a darkly lit Chinese restaurant near the Home Office, a scene played out that would alarm any government whip. There, in a corner of Ma La Sichuan, was Liz Truss, dining with three of her allies. Simon Clarke, her one-time levelling up secretary, and Ranil Jayawardena, her environment secretary, were present. They were joined by her former parliamentary private secretary Rob Butler. None of them have prospered under Rishi Sunak.
In theory, there’s nothing suspicious about old colleagues reminiscing about past times over dim sum. But given there’s not much to cheer about Truss’s 49-day premiership, onlookers couldn’t help wondering whether the conversation was looking forwards rather than backwards. Clarke has already opened hostilities with Sunak, pushing to overturn the ban on new onshore wind farms. He’s backed by Truss and Boris Johnson. He’s also setting up a new group of Tories dedicated to that Trussite watchword: growth.
This group of MPs has the potential to throw the prime minister’s best laid plans off course. Just three months ago, Truss was centre stage and warning about the anti-growth coalition: the vested interests and groups blocking her agenda. Now Sunak has to worry about the pro-growth coalition within Tory ranks. Growth is becoming a proxy, for Truss and Johnson supporters, to push Sunak into being more energetic and radical, explains a wise party hand.
Of course, Sunak would insist that he, too, is pro-growth. He listed growing the economy as one of his five priorities in his speech to kick off the new year, emphasising the need for innovation. Yet some MPs were left underwhelmed. “He was talking about technocratic measures of growth,” says one who attended. “He’s looking at it as an economic concept rather than an emotional one too.” Sunak’s supporters argue that with no real authority over his MPs, trying anything too bold would only expose weakness.
The less than edifying circumstances of Truss’s ejection from Downing Street mean that both she and members of her cabinet have been keeping largely quiet. She has been doing a good line in black humour. (“It’s all going very well, wouldn’t you say?” is her ice-breaker for politicians she hasn’t seen in a while.) Johnson’s supporters, by contrast, have been vocal. Jake Berry has predicted his return while Nadine Dorries has bemoaned “three years of a progressive Tory government being washed down the drain” (she was referring to Sunak’s abandonment of plans to privatise Channel 4).
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But as the Trussites emerge from a period of reflection, they could pose the bigger threat in an ideological fight. They did, after all, triumph over Sunak in the argument with Tory members. “These MPs haven’t suddenly changed their world view,” says a former adviser to Truss. As Clarke put it in an interview with The Spectator this week: “There is a real risk that with Liz’s eclipse comes the wider rejection of an entire school of Tory thinking.” He warns that “a battle for the soul of the Tory party is under way”.
The good news for Sunak is that as things stand, a large chunk of these MPs don’t want to throw another prime minister out of Downing Street. Free market Tories in marginal seats, such as Clarke and Jacob Rees-Mogg, will be nervous about more leader volatility ahead of the next election. But they also don’t want to sit back and do nothing for two years. Instead, they want to see Sunak expand his ambitions for growth across housing, childcare and work.
Both Truss and the ministers who served her believe that despite the market turmoil and political chaos of her seven weeks in power, there is a legacy to protect. A taster came this week on the news that Sunak had ditched her plans to loosen staff-child ratios in nurseries. A source close to Truss said the decision was “economically and politically counterproductive”. That a draft policy had suddenly become a row caught No 10 off guard. “We can’t do 15 things at once,” said a government aide — not ruling out childcare reform in the future.
But when a party is trailing by 20 points in the polls, even MPs in the centre question whether slow-and-steady can be the answer. Clarke’s new outfit — Next Generation Tories — is aimed at bringing younger voters to the party, a cause with which few would disagree. But it is ultimately free market with a focus on housebuilding and planning.
Truss could join the fray next. She has hired a press chief and there are talks about the possibility of her fronting or taking a role with a think tank. Not everyone thinks it is such a great idea. “I think silence is undervalued,” says a former aide.
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Either way, she is likely to pick her interventions carefully rather than risk becoming a serial rebel. The two areas she is most keen to speak out on are Ukraine and the economy. A pre-budget intervention on the need for growth is possible. A supporter says that she is not about to do a “volte face” on the issue.
The Truss project didn’t survive long enough for her to publish her growth plan, but a draft of the eight-page document offers a taste of the kind of policies this group is likely to advocate. They include mobile phone planning reform (relaxing planning regulations to extend 5G coverage across the country) which aides predicted would cause a parliamentary row over the digging required for new cabling. On childcare, easing restrictions for childminders; on farming, slowing cuts to subsidies to give the average farmer an extra £7,000 over two years; and on immigration, removing students and temporary workers from the net migration statistics as part of a looser policy to bolster the economy.
The public may have balked at the agenda. But while some MPs undoubtedly backed Truss for careerist reasons, plenty more regard her reform pitch as the right one. “If they pick their fight well, they’ll start a debate on direction,” says an MP who backed Sunak.
The risk for Sunak is that his personal preference to underpromise and overdeliver leaves a vacuum for others to fill. If he doesn’t deliver and the local elections are bad, Johnson may start to woo those who feel their voices have not been heard — and argue that managerialism is not enough. It’s a threat that’s taken seriously in No 10. It means Sunak will need to continue to govern like a man balancing a coalition that could collapse at any moment — keeping a critical mass of Truss’s growth group on side.
Katy Balls is political editor of The Spectator
