Was the CONHome members’ survey the driver of the re-shuffle?
And Truss should be taken seriously as a possible “Next PM”
One of the features of ConHome, which was founded a few months after PB in 2004, has been its monthly survey of party members and the publication of its league table with net satisfaction levels for Cabinet members.
It is surely not a coincidence that the reshuffle winners and losers could have been predicted from the latest survey which was published by the site on September 5th. Three of the bottom four lost their jobs and the other, Dominic Raab, suffered a serious demotion.
For months Liz Truss has topped the table and she now moves to one of the top positions in the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary – a role that used to be held by BoJo.
The comprehensive school-educated minister first came to prominence when she got selected for Norfolk SW ahead of GE2010 and there was an attempt by members there to unseat her who got dubbed “The Turnip Taleban”. This is from the Indy in 2014.
Her back story is a good one for a modern Tory. She is a northerner, for a start, the product of a comprehensive education, brought up by left-wing parents in Paisley and Leeds. As a child, she marched through Paisley chanting: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out.” But after graduating from Oxford University, she went into the private sector, working for Shell, and Cable & Wireless, and developed a purist pro-free market ideology. As a newly elected MP, she was a founder of the Free Enterprise Group, and one of five authors of a 2012 booklet entitled Britannia Unchained, which became notorious because of a single sentence plucked from it, which alleged that “the British are among the worst idlers in the world”. Appointed an education minister in September 2012, she pushed through changes to the A-level, in the teeth of opposition from Labour and from the unions. She is also a rare example of a working mother at the highest level of politics.
In the next PM betting Truss has now replaced Raab as the third favourite behind Sunak and Starmer. She’s worth a punt.