Could Liz Truss be replaced before the election?
Is Parris right about her shortcomings?
There’s a very powerful piece by the former Tory MP Matthew Parris in the Times this morning raising doubts about Liz Truss – the woman who looks set to be the next CON leader and PM. He writes:
In Times columns I’ve offered my first impressions of this candidate. They were that she was intellectually shallow, her convictions wafer-thin; that she was driven by ambition pure and simple; that her manner was wooden and her ability to communicate convincingly to an electorate wider than the narrow band of Tory activists was virtually non-existent; that she was dangerously impulsive and headstrong, with a self-belief unattended by precaution; and that her leadership of the Conservative Party and our country would be a tragedy for both…Liz Truss is a planet-sized mass of overconfidence and ambition teetering upon a pinhead of a political brain. It must all come crashing down…I’ll wager that at the outset most readers thought Liz Truss a bit weird, curiously hollow and potentially dangerous. This summer a short period will see such rushes to judgment revised. Then government will descend into a huge effort to contain and defang an unstable prime minister; and we shall revert to our first impressions. Save yourself the detour and stick with them. She’s crackers. It isn’t going to work.
I have heard others make similar arguments but not as powerfully as Parris. This got me thinking and I just wonder as we get closer to the General Election whether there will be an effort to replace her. The Tories as we know can be pretty ruthless when needs must