Liz Truss sparks latest bout of cabinet disunity

It’s coming home! Football is coming home! Germany is out of the World Cup at the group stage. Rejoice. Rejoice. How does it feel? HOW DOES IT FEEL?

Right. Now that’s out of my system, I can begin.

The government had another bout of public disunity as Liz Truss claimed it was “not macho” for cabinet ministers to lobby for bigger budgets. She accused Michael Gove of generating too much “hot air” as environment secretary.

If Truss can seem a sort of cipher for vulgarized free market orthodoxies (she’s recently taken to annotating all her tweets with the hashtagged #LiberationNation), this absurd intervention also lacked some basic nous. The Tories’ pledge on the NHS was barmy economics but played well in the media and at PMQs; and Gove is the only domestic success story of this government.

After the Foreign Secretary’s F*** business outburst, maybe it was important to stress the Tories’ commitment to reducing the size of the state and making the case for free enterprise, which the Tories have supported in the main for almost forty years.

At PMQs today, we had a near-perfect illustration of the weird way Brexit has played with the political categories of left and right. We had Corbyn posing as the champion of business, joining key big companies like Airbus in their disquiet over the government’s Brexit strategy; and May having to make frantic reassurances that Brexit wouldn’t, erm, f*** business.

Corbyn even said: “business is entitled to be listened to with respect.” Well, quite. Theresa May came back with the rather pithy: “He can either back business or he can want to overthrow capitalism. He can’t do both.” But his point was already made.

In the US, politics is just as topsy turvy. A fascinating election result has emerged from the US as an unknown 28-year-old left-winger beat Joe Crowley, a leading figure of the Democrat establishment, to the Democrat nomination for congress in New York. He had run the Queens borough for twenty years. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an extraordinary character, having come to prominence in such a short time, and from almost no political profile: just last year she had been working as a bartender. She is very much from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party having organized for the Senator in 2016.

So is this the Democrat’s ‘Trump moment’ when the centrist establishment gets blind-sided by an insurgent activist force? Perhaps. Her rhetoric makes for a marked contrast to Hillary’s ‘rainbow coalition’ vs ‘the deplorables’ identity politics, and she has a powerful personal story to tell, which Hillary always lacked: “My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure … I started bartending and waitressing. I understand the pain of working-class Americans because I have experienced the pain.”

She added that the Democrats must craft a “vision that will earn the support of working-class Americans.” It was the same blue-collar workers who voted en masse for Obama in 2008 and 2012 that voted for Trump in 2016 – deplorables they ain’t.

Alastair Benn

News editor