PM Of The Uneasy Kingdom

Liz Truss's boosterism won't help a Britain that matters less globally & is crisis-hit at home

- Rashmee Roshan

Britain has a new girl boss, Liz Truss, but the country’s new, always Insta-ready prime minister has a problem. She speaks the language of relentless boosterism – the upbeat idiom of her predecessor, Boris Johnson – but lacks his charisma and people-pleasing delivery. She offers nostrums – a power fantasy and utopian economic promise – that reprise Britain’s Iron Lady but Truss ain’t no Maggie Thatcher.

In any case, today’s Britain is a world away from the nation that Thatcher decisively (and divisively) put on course for growth in the 1980s by drastic privatisations and deregulation. At the weekend, GDP figures from IMF showed Britain slipping one place below India, which is now the world’s fifth largest economy.

What chance then for Truss, Britain’s third successive PM to be chosen by Conservative Party members rather than the general public, to succeed? Her to-do list is long and daunting.

● It starts with a cost-of-living crisis that encompasses spiralling energy bills, double-digit inflation, rising mortgage rates and fears of a long recession.

● Meanwhile, public finances are creaky, the National Health Service dangerously overstretched and a rash of strikes is breaking out.

● Postal workers are staying home later this week (September 8 and 9) and trains are mostly grinding to a halt on September 15 and 17, and will be heavily disrupted on September 26.