Why Liz Truss's failed attempt to create a new 'bogeyman' has proven she is the dangerous one - Euan McColm

A miserable aspect of contemporary politics is the way in which so many people in power got there with the help of imaginary enemies.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng (left) and Britain's Prime Minister Liz Truss watch a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II on the opening day of the annual Conservative Party conference. Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Our new era of populism has seen leaders across the world prey on insecurity to set themselves up as great saviours.

There is nothing new about this tactic. Throughout history, particularly at times of economic uncertainty, political opportunists have confidently offered simple solutions to complex problems.

Often, we may look at this sort of thing taking place overseas and despair at the dysfunction of global politics. Which of us didn’t watch with horror as Donald Trump coasted to victory in 2016 US Presidential Election on a wave of lies and scaremongering?

But we are hardly immune to this sort of thing.

For years, the SNP has suggested that opponents of independence think Scotland “too wee, too poor, and too stupid” to go it alone. This, however, is a straw-man created by the nationalists. You will spend a long time trying to find a Unionist politician ever having said such a thing.

But who cares about the facts? This SNP suggestion that others think less of you is compelling enough to those susceptible to a spot of light grievance before lunch.

More recently, the pro-Brexit campaign really went to town with the suggestion of victimhood.

Didn’t we all know that sneering unelected bureaucrats were playing games with our lives? Didn’t we realise hordes of illegal immigrants were, even now, gathering on our shores to take from us what was rightfully ours? Didn’t we care that our NHS was being starved of funds because our hard-earned cash was being sent abroad? To bloody foreigners?

Since victory for the Brexit campaign in the 2016 referendum, the Conservative Party has continued to ramp up narratives of victimhood. If you voted for Brexit and it turned out the warnings of the downsides were true, that wasn’t the fault of the Eurosceptics, it was the fault of the “elites” and “remoaners” who chose not to believe in Britain.

Shameless? Of course. Successful? Sadly so.

When Boris Johnson led the Tories to a huge general election victory in 2019, he did so on the promise that he’d “get Brexit done”. The only reason it had not been “got done” was that naysayers had prevented it.

In fact, Brexit had been “got done”. The withdrawal agreement negotiated by the UK Government and the European Union was published two months before the general election. But who cares about facts? Certainly not Boris Johnson.

When Liz Truss succeeded Johnson as Prime Minister in the foreign country of last month, she clearly planned to continue with this story of how only her party could protect voters from sinister forces.

In her first address to the nation, outside 10 Downing Street, Truss told us that she would tackle the issues that were “holding Britain back”.

This was all well and good, but not only had Brexit been “got done”, the Tories had been in power for the previous 12 years and Truss had been in ministerial office for ten of them. A cynic might have wondered whether she was complicit in any holding back of Britain.

Although it was clear before she got the job that Truss was entirely unsuitable to be Prime Minister, she and her party still had those bogeymen to rely on. Let nobody doubt, said her acolytes and hangers on, that here was a PM on the side of the ordinary man and woman.

This story crumbed into dust two weeks ago when Truss’s Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, unveiled his “mini-budget”. If Labour’s 1983 manifesto was, in the words of the late Gerald Kaufman MP, “the longest suicide note in history”, then Kwarteng’s statement may qualify as the shortest.

We know, all too well, what the immediate impact of the Chancellor’s plan was. The pound tanked and the Bank of England had to intervene to save people’s pension schemes. Those with mortgages now face horrendous increases in their monthly payments as interest rates rise.

But Truss and Kwarteng’s plan had another effect. It destroyed the idea they were on the side of what politicians are prone to call “decent, hard-working” families.

It showed they were not the protectors of ordinary voters, but of the super-rich, of the hedge-fund managers and property developers whose wealth might see obscene to people struggling to heat their homes and feed their kids during the current cost-of-living crisis.

The decision to cut the top-rate of tax exposed the reality of the situation. Truss and Kwarteng and anyone craven enough to support their project are not on “your side”, they are on the side of the very “elites” they have spent years condemning.

The Government U-turn on the tax decision will not fix this problem for the Prime Minister. The cat is out of the bag now. It wasn’t “metropolitan liberals” and other subversives who were taking voters for fools, it was Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.

During her pitifully written and woefully delivered speech to the Tory Conference in Birmingham on Wednesday, Truss tried to conjure up a new bogeyman. She would protect us all from “the anti-growth coalition”. Apparently, this shadowy organisation, comprising members of Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, along with commentators and other know-alls, is to blame for our woes.

But if we trust in Truss, she will shield us from them. She is our protector and she wishes only to serve.

It was all rather pathetic.

Liz Truss, like all populists, created unseen monsters, lurking in the dark, ready to strike, but – all along – she was the dangerous one.