Fergus Finlay: Liz Truss marks a downward step in decline of trust in British politics

Almost everyone believed that Boris Johnson was as low as trust in politics could fall. Truss, it transpires, can go lower

British prime minister Liz Truss has had a very shaky start to the leadership and the opinion polls say that people have had enough of the Tories.

YOU fall in love with Donegal. It’s impossible not to. Its scenery, its lakes and mountains, and seas. Its towns and villages — Portsalon, Rathmullan, Ramelton, Downings, and Creeslough. Its people — there’s a warmth and openness to the welcome throughout Donegal that is quite unique in the world.

Above all maybe its peace. You can almost feel your heart rate slowing as you cross into the county. A week or a fortnight will go by and you’ll suddenly realise that all the stress in your life has drifted away. There’s something in the air, most of the time, that is quite glorious.

Maybe that’s why it’s impossible to find the words to try to bring some comfort in the face of the awful pain and loss that the whole of Donegal is suffering now. I’ve never had any skill at producing the right words at moments of tragedy anyway — my instinct always is to try to put my arms around anyone grieving. Sometimes that’s welcome, sometimes it’s not, and I get that entirely.

I’m guessing everyone in Ireland right now would like to put their arms around the people of Creeslough. In a tiny place, (in the most recent census the population of Creeslough was less than 400) everyone knows everyone. Places like Creeslough survive good times and bad because people look out for their neighbours. Everyone in the village will probably have known someone who died on a first name basis. It’s hard, it’s really hard.

I hope they get all the resources they need to get through what they must go through. And I hope they know that all of us want to stand with them and alongside them.

It’s not my intention to write this week about Creeslough. Nobody in the village thought a few days ago that every stranger in Ireland would be writing about them. But all of us, I guess, want them to know we’ll do whatever we can to help them through the terrible time they have to contend with.

Comedy of errors

I wrote last week here about something altogether different, the unfolding comedy of errors that is Liz Truss.

It was Karl Marx, I think, who said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy the second as farce. It was hard not to keep thinking of that idea when you watched Boris Johnson’s immediate successor standing in front of a not-quite-full hall of the middle-aged, middle-class people who elected her a few weeks ago. Those who were awake (a bare majority) looked mildly astonished as she stood there shouting “growth, growth, growth” at them.

She had a weird, fatuous smile on her face as she said it, as if she had just told them a funny story worthy of Billy Connolly. And perhaps she had. By then she had been prime minister a week, and the only growth for which she had been responsible was an exponential rise in mortgage interest rates. She stood there, ranting about growth and the enemies of growth, days after her actions had destroyed the British currency. It was pure farce.

Liz Truss's first Tory conference as leader was bizarre to say the least.

Throughout the entire few days of the most bizarre Tory conference in history, farce abounded. Anyone who had earlier watched the chancellor of the exchequer Kwazi Kwarteng wandering onto an empty stage, talking absolute tripe for a few minutes, and then wandering off into the wings to muted applause, must have wondered what the hell was going on in a political party that has been dominant in British politics for a decade.

It seemed, if you were following the coverage, that it would be impossible to find two Tories who could agree with each other about the time of day. They even spent an awful lot of energy appearing to pretend that they hadn’t been in government before. Kwazi Kwarteng talked about a period of “slow managed decline” that he was determined to reverse. Who, you wondered, could possibly have engineered this disaster if not the party that had been in power for 12 years?

Under and behind the farce was an uglier, nastier attempt. The Tories’ new home secretary Suella Braverman (whose immediate past was as one of the worst attorneys general ever, by all accounts) waxed eloquent at the conference about how she dreamt of planes taking off to Rwanda. She has staked her reputation now on her determination to introduce the harshest immigrations laws the UK has ever seen, and she has said she won’t allow any human rights legislation to get in her way.

And she uses deeply corrosive and inflammatory rhetoric in pursuit of those demeaning political objectives. The academic, Maya Goodfellow, has said that if Braverman has her way, more people will die trying to get into the United Kingdom to escape persecution or oppression.

That’s where farce tips over into tragedy. But tragedy is visible in other aspects of the Tories' behaviour too.

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What they seem to be trying to do is take pages from the Trump playbook. The “anti-growth coalition” is a clear attempt to make a target out of any critic. Several of the pro-Truss Tories interviewed during the conference made no secret of their disdain for the media — they barely managed to avoid using the term ‘fake news’. Braverman and others are trying to fan the flames of a culture war and are swimming on the surface of a racist swamp to do it.

Luckily perhaps (back to farce again) they’re very bad at it so far. Their attempts are so cack-handed and pathetic, and they’re so immersed in failure themselves, that it has so far blown up in their faces. What it has revealed is, as desperation grows, there will be no tactic too underhand for them to employ.

No more 'united'

The other tragedy, in historic terms anyway, is that the entire charade has effectively removed the word ‘united’ from the phrase ‘the United Kingdom’. Tories and Toryism are systematically, day by day, removing any sense that the broad populations of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland ought to have any loyalty to the Palace of Westminster. The government of the United Kingdom is now, unmistakably, the government of little England. Nothing else matters to them.

In decades to come, when historians come to debate the collapse of the union, an honest analysis may well conclude that the primary cause of what is coming may well be the contempt with which an arrogant, out-of-touch and incompetent set of Tory politicians treated the people who elected them to govern.

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it, that the change from Boris Johnson actually represented a further step downwards in the decline of trust in politics. Almost everyone believed that Johnson was as low as trust in politics could fall. Truss, it transpires, can go lower.

The opinion polls in Britain are saying right now that people cannot wait to be rid of them and replace them with a Labour government. I wonder if it’s almost too late. Another three months or so of this gang, and there is every possibility that trust in ordinary democratic politics will be destroyed entirely. I’m half afraid to contemplate what could happen then, even in one of the great parliamentary democracies of the world.