Former Conservative PM, whose tenure lasted 50 days, tells CPAC she fell victim to UK’s ‘establishment … its bureaucrats and lawyers’
Former Conservative PM, whose tenure lasted 50 days, tells CPAC she fell victim to UK’s ‘establishment … its bureaucrats and lawyers’
I mean, it is true that there’s an unelected administrative bureaucracy that the government – any government – needs to function. And the UK is well known for having a particularly strong civil service with its own views and preferences. It’s the country that gave us Yes, Minister.
So yeah, there is a deep state that thwarts politicians do try to do overly crazy stuff. And that’s a good thing.
The UK has an independent civil service but the problem with Truss’s premiership isn’t that they thwarted her, it’s that she thwarted them - if she hadn’t broken with convention by deliberately freezing out the OBR from what she was planning (meaning there were no independent fiscal projections to go alongside her budget), then either the OBR could have warned her about the consequences, or at the very least the bond market might have reacted less violently to the announcements.
She’s crafted a narrative that some left-wing state establishment brought her down, when the actual facts are that her own party removed her after she spooked the financial markets - neither of them being much of a bastion of leftist thinking. The civil service quietly took all this lying down, which is what the markets (which tend to like good economic governance - OBR, central bank independence, etc) were so worried about.