Ups and downs

This week: what the hell is wrong with Liz Truss? Also, some important notes on Britain’s only funicular tram; and I get mad about golf, all over again.

On Monday morning, an interviewer asked Liz Truss a question: “Prime Minister, do you enjoy chaos?” After a two second pause that lasted roughly a decade and a half, the Prime Minister responded: “Well, I don’t know what your question is getting at. Why don’t you be more specific?” This was not, perhaps, the reassuring answer the public is looking for right now.

Another story, which on the face of it is not about Liz Truss, and whose significance I’ll get to below. When I have, less frequently than I would like, been asked to go on the radio to shout about housing, I have generally been put up against someone from the extremely popular and well-funded Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. And every time this has happened, I have been stunned by quite how terrible its spokespeople were at putting their case. They’re so unable to counter even the most basic of pro-housing arguments (“The green belt is not very green”, say, or “There isn’t enough brownfield to meet demand”), that I seriously wondered whether they’d even heard them before.

But the level of support, and this inability to make their case, are not in fact independent variables. CPRE spokespeople are bad at this because they had so much support. They weren’t used to being in rooms in which anyone disagreed with them. And so, when it happens, they’re baffled.

Liz Truss isn’t in this story; and as has become painfully obvious this last two weeks, her problem is not an excess of support. But the reason I think it helps explain the mess she’s found herself in is because she, too, has spent her career in rooms where she didn’t have to persuade anyone. She was elected to one of the safest Tory seats in Britain in the year her party returned to government. Before that, she spent her formative years in the world of right-wing think tanks, where enthusiasm for smashing stuff up a bit is not just the path to prosperity, it’s how you get attention in the first place. Little wonder, then, that for Truss the natural answer to the question, “Do you enjoy chaos?” isn’t “No”: it rather depends what kind of chaos you’re talking about. 

One of the comfortable things about bubbles such as this, though, is that you can seal yourself off in them. You can spend your life debating with people who agree with you on everything but the finest of details, like medieval theologians disagreeing furiously about the number of angels you can fit on the head of a pin. Even when you do talk to outsiders, they’re likely to be centrist newspaper columnists or left-wing activists, the sort of people you might bump into at conference or outside the Red Lion, but for whom politics is still, largely, a matter of theory more than practice. Real voters need never come into it.