Britain needs an economic strategy – instead we’ve got Liz Truss
During a blissful holiday in the Vaucluse I managed to avoid any news about this dangerously absurd Conservative leadership election – that is, apart from one classic Truss gaffe.
Yes, the news that Liz Truss had declared that “the jury is out” on the UK’s future relations with France most certainly struck a dissonant chord with Kate McKinley, who runs the Mourchon winery in Séguret. She informed me of it with a despairing air, adding also that President Emmanuel Macron had reacted with the tolerance that has become his lot in matters of Anglo-French relations as long as the Brexiters reign over here.
However, the jury is certainly not out on Truss. She has condemned herself even before assuming the Tory leadership tomorrow. As a horseracing man, I feel I ought to remind readers that dead certainties do not always win – bookmakers at Ascot were offering 6-1 on a Labour victory the day before the 1992 election in which John Major triumphed. Nevertheless it looks as though Rishi Sunak will need divine intervention to reverse the odds now. By the way, it was not uninteresting that a week before that 1992 election a horse called Party Politics had won the Grand National.
To my mind both candidates are seriously misguided on many matters, but especially over continuing to support Brexit when it is such an obvious disaster: among other things, it is seriously eroding the nation’s tax revenues – which Truss and Sunak want to cut further (in Truss’s case, tomorrow!). It is such a disaster that the one and only Jacob Rees-Mogg wants to postpone the implementation of further border controls that are part of the Brexit “deal”.
The needless complications and bureaucratic consequences of Brexit are affecting and annoying more and more
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