Person of the week: Liz Truss
Johnson is followed by the Maggie Thatcher double
By Wolfram Weimer
08/02/2022 09:27 am
In the power struggle to succeed Boris Johnson, Liz Truss has the best chance of winning. The Tory base loves her because she evokes all sorts of memories of an iconic Prime Minister. She plays the role so brazenly that it resembles a very different Tory.
Liz Truss is way ahead in surveys, and even very far among British bookmakers. According to betting exchange Smarkets, she now has a whopping 90.9 percent chance of winning to succeed Boris Johnson. Less than four weeks after the British Prime Minister announced his resignation, members of the conservative Tory party are electing a successor. The approximately 200,000 party members can cast their votes until September 2, but it would take a miracle for Truss to lose the election to ex-Finance Minister Rishi Sunak.
Truss is currently having a good laugh
(Photo: picture alliance / empics)
The party base is so fond of her because Truss appears to many conservatives as a comeback from Margaret Thatcher. Tories adore the Iron Lady, who was Britain’s first female Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. And Liz Truss has worked systematically to ensure that Thatcher’s legend is associated with her. Truss has circulated photos in which she recreates well-known Thatcher shots. Sometimes she wears an old-fashioned, huge white bow during a televised debate – just like the one Thatcher wore in front of the cameras in 1979. Another time, on a warship or from the hatch of a tank, she puts herself in thatcher’s exact posture. On a visit to Moscow, she wore a long coat and an exaggeratedly thick fur hat – just like Thatcher 35 years earlier.
The promise of the slim state
Truss gets a lot of ridicule for this photo stalking – but at the same time she achieves the desired goal of being associated with Thatcher. This solidifies the narrative. Her fans celebrate her as “the new Maggie”, also because she represents similarly pithy positions: a clear line as an offensive economic liberal who opposes left-wing fashions and any statism with an open visor.
The foreign minister will “abolish the outdated economic orthodoxy and run our economy in a conservative manner,” writes Finance Minister Nadhim Zahawi in an article for the Telegraph newspaper. Zahawi ran for prime minister himself but now supports Truss. Like Tatcher, she promises immediate tax cuts and wants to save citizens £30 billion by eliminating a fuel levy and cutting social security contributions. She is also against the higher corporation tax from next spring.
A left turned right side out
But Liz Truss has also trained some Thatcher elements in her way of speaking – bridging long pauses with an old lady-like power smile or serving pantomime-like gestures to aggressive language templates.
When Truss calls for tax breaks, praises British armaments and rails against Russia, it sounds like Thatcher, but it doesn’t sound like her own biography. Because she comes from a family of Thatcher opponents with an explicitly left-wing attitude. Her father, a mathematics professor, and her mother, who was a teacher, often took Liz and her three siblings to left-wing demonstrations and peace marches.
Even as a student at Oxford University, she made a name for herself as president of the “Liberal Democrat Society” with demands that normally cause conservatives to gasp, such as the abolition of the monarchy.
Or rather a Johnson copy?
Even as a young member of parliament, she presented herself as a rather liberal and modernist, and even as a minister she voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum. However, since the party and parliamentary group formed as a Brexit combat force, their attitude has changed to the complete opposite. Since then, she has appeared as if she invented Brexit herself. And she professes the libertarian foundations of Thatcherism as loudly as if she had dreamed it up all by herself at her parents’ socialist kitchen table. Their speeches today are mere proclamations for free trade, patriotism and conservatism. Nothing seems to have survived from their liberal pre-Brexit life.
These changes in position earn her the accusation of being particularly opportunistic and calculating. That’s why die-hard Thatcher fans don’t see them as guardians of firm convictions. And the political opposition denigrates her as an actress of herself Guardian editorial therefore sees her not as a new embodiment of Thatcher but as a revenant of Boris Johnson. Truss doesn’t care – her strategy of making a career as a Thatcher double seems to be working.