Is Liz Truss going to survive? What the Sunday papers say

Tim Shipman in the Times says Grant Shapps and Michael Gove are trying to organise the defenestration of Liz Truss. Very, very stupid of her not to give them positions in her cabinet. She is displaying the vindictiveness and lack of intelligence of Theresa May.

According to Mr Shipman, rumours have reached the whips of Michael Gove privately saying the biggest names should “get the old gang back together”. 

"One MP said: “Michael thinks Boris and Rishi should come together and get the show back on the road.” It is unclear how this might work, given that Sunak resigned from Johnson’s government and Johnson sacked Gove as an act of revenge for his betrayal in 2016."

This is not accurate. Mr. Johnson didn't fire him because of his betrayal in 2016 but his betrayal in July this year, when he (and plenty of others) told him he had to resign.

Mr Shipman says a former Downing Street aide told him, “Penny [Mordaunt]is full on manoeuvres. She told someone directly that she was restarting her campaign.” 

Another MP told him off the record: “The options are death if we stick with Liz or ridicule if we get someone else and right now ridicule seems preferable.” 

Very interestingly, Mr Shipman says Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) Kwasi Kwarteng told Grant Shapps that Truss’s chances of survival are “only 40-60”, though the Chancellor denies the remarks. I'd believe Tim Shipman, wouldn't you, presuming he must have heard it from Mr Shapps?

Here is a brilliant and, for British Tories, a very, very depressing article by Will Lloyd.

This is John Rentoul in the Independent.

" She cannot now restore the government’s fiscal credibility without either cutting public spending or putting taxes up again. Parliament won’t vote for spending cuts, and raising taxes will only damage her reputation further."

I do not usually find Andrew Rawnsley worth reading, but he is on good form today.

"Never forget that she attracted just 50 votes in the first leadership ballot, which means that 305 Tory MPs thought someone else would do a better job, a judgment that has since been rewarded with ample vindication. She didn’t get into the last two until the final round and then had the backing of fewer than a third of her colleagues."


"Never in the field of British politics has a leader become so staggeringly unpopular in such a spectacularly short time. Her approval ratings have plunged below those of Theresa May just before she was forced to resign and below those of Boris Johnson just before he was ejected from Downing Street. He became slow-poisoning electoral arsenic for the Tories; she is instant electoral cyanide."

"There’s no consensus about how her defenestration might be engineered or who would take her place or how on earth they’d contrive this without making the Tory party look even more demented. So, at the time of writing, she remains at Number 10, a leader without a majority who makes things even worse for herself by behaving as if the country awarded her a landslide, still in office, but power gurgling away, her brief premiership already circling the plughole."

I hope Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, Penny Mordaunt and Michael Gove go to her and tell her she must go and Mr Sunak take over.

I don't believe they will. They dislike each other too much and Penny thinks she should be PM. 

Boris was not up to the job and not remotely conservative, but at least he stood a (very) slim chance of winning the next election.

Meanwhile, in an interview in the Financial Times, Mr Gove said of Brexit: “I ask myself all the time 'Was it the right thing to do?'" 

This has not gone down well with Remainer Twitter. 

What will a Labour government do with Brexit?