Liz Truss must remember that governing well is about more than winning elections

Almost every MP would like to be prime minister, but no prime minister would choose to take office in the circumstances now facing Liz Truss. Amid forecasts – volunteered if not commissioned – of the most difficult economic period to confront the UK in decades, with many other serious challenges coming rapidly down the track, Truss is taking on the job she has long coveted but under conditions that will make it exceptionally difficult to succeed.  

The immediate problems Truss faces have deep roots

As an expert IfG panel discussed this morning, the first months of Liz Truss’s premiership will certainly be characterised by urgent challenges – backlogs in the NHS and other public services, strikes in the public and private sector, skyrocketing energy prices and inflation, and political crisis in Northern Ireland being among the most serious. But she is not the first prime minister to enter office in difficult circumstances and must avoid leading her new government in rolling crisis-management mode, which could lead to a focus on the symptoms – rather than the causes – of the problems the UK faces.  

A rapid response will be necessary to deal with some problems – including most obviously the impact of the rising cost of energy on households and businesses – but most of the challenges now facing the UK are neither new nor likely to recede soon. They are simply the latest dramatic manifestations of longstanding and intractable problems with deep roots. Backlogs in the NHS for example have been created not just by Covid but also by years-long staffing shortages and a decade of historically low funding increases. If Truss follows through on her promised tax cuts and defence spending commitment, then this will restrict the funding available to address such problems. In the leadership campaign, Truss made much of her record of delivery – if she wants to lead a successful government in the long term she will need to focus not just on solving immediate problems but on putting in place the building blocks to ensure that her policies are sustainable. 

Truss must now pivot to face a new electorate

Having stepped out of one electoral process and straight into the next, Truss will need to decide how to strike a balance between delivering on the many promises she has made to the narrow and relatively homogenous Conservative 'selectorate' and developing policies that will address the far more varied and complex needs of the wider UK electorate. The interests of Red Wall voters are in many ways different from those of traditional Conservative voters. She has clearly signalled that she will not be afraid to make bold choices driven by her guiding Conservative philosophy, but her career to date has also demonstrated that she is a pragmatist who is willing to shift position when the politics changes. Her main objective has just shifted from securing the premiership to winning the next general election she has indicated she will call in 2024.

To govern well and achieve her electoral objectives, Truss must prioritise ruthlessly. Her task is to identify the key policies which will address the problems facing the country as well as forming the main planks of her bid to win a personal mandate in the general election – filling in the detail behind the broad brush commitments she has made. One of the current unknowns is how she will approach issues that received relatively little air-time during the leadership campaign such as levelling up and climate change. The levelling up agenda was heavily identified with the last administration, but Johnson prioritised it for good reason – because he saw it as key to retaining the votes of the Red Wall. Truss’s actions in the next few days and weeks will reveal whether she shares the same analysis as her predecessor.   

Truss must equip herself to deliver

As all prime ministers discover rapidly, Truss will not be able to deliver her policy priorities through sheer force of will. Rather she must build and lead a government capable of delivering those policies – bending the machine of government to her wishes. And with the general election just two years away she needs to act fast. Early decisions about her ministerial team will be crucial, including putting heavy hitting and effective secretaries of state in key departments suited to their interests and skills, complementing energy with experience, and building in sufficient diversity of view that key decisions can be tested and iterated effectively.

How Truss sets up the centre of government will be key to equipping herself to deliver. She has decided to strip back the size of the No.10 team. Shifting the policy and delivery units to the Cabinet Office would work if the prime minister continues to invest time and authority in them, and some rationalisation of total headcount may be required. But Truss must be careful to avoid the mistakes of numerous previous prime ministers whose early streamlining zeal saw them remove key capabilities at the centre that they later found themselves needing to rebuild, having wasted precious time. Apparently boring things – like outcome delivery plans, the performance management tools that are starting to become embedded in Whitehall – will be important in enabling her to define her priorities, drive delivery and hold ministers and civil servants to account for the results.    

One notable feature of the leadership campaign was Truss’s emphasis on her willingness to challenge orthodoxies – including the economic thinking that has underpinned decision making in the Treasury in recent decades and the scientific advice which led to Covid lockdowns. Natural scepticism and a desire to test assumptions are admirable qualities in a policy maker but, at the extreme, may slow decision making or lead to perverse outcomes.

Truss now has numerous structures, experts and institutions at her disposal – from the Bank of England to the Climate Change Committee, and from the chief scientific adviser to the currently vacant post of independent adviser on ministerial interests – who can provide her and her ministers with the data and analysis to make strong, evidence-based decisions. Final decisions are clearly for her, but she should not allow a suspicion of experts and advisers to minimise the contribution these can make to the process of government. An early signal of her approach will be whether – now that the Office of Budget Responsibility has clearly signalled it is ready to provide her with an updated economic forecast – Truss continues to maintain that she doesn’t need this information before making long-term decisions about tax cuts.      

Campaigning and governing require different strengths

Governing well is much harder than successful campaigning and successful government is about much more than managing to remain in power. As Boris Johnson found to his cost – eventually even a reputation as an exceptional vote-winner cannot protect a leader if he or she fails to deliver a stable, accountable government, together with a consistent policy programme. Liz Truss faces an even more daunting agenda than Johnson when he entered office but does not yet have a reputation as a vote-winner to fall back on. Her actions in the coming days will tell us much about whether she has what it takes to lead and to govern successfully.