Editor’s View: Another PM resigns, what on earth next?
Liz Truss looks downcast as she resigns as PM © Andy Rain EPA EFE Shutterstock Eagle-eyed viewers will note this is not the editorial that appeared in this week’s magazine.
A weekly that attempts to ride the news agenda occasionally gets bucked off when the pace of change accelerates and it’s certainly been one of those weeks in Westminster.
All politicians lose power the longer they go on but for Liz Truss, she didn’t so much watch her political capital trickle away as fling it on a bonfire of her own hubris.
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What does this mean for farming? Who the hell knows. Another leader will mean another cabinet reshuffle. Boris Johnson is apparently considering a tilt.
He is, as his supporters note, the only Tory politician with a mandate from the previous election.
He also maintained a sturdy blob of supporters who were willing to overlook all of his frequent iniquities in matters personal and political.
Should he succeed (and it seems foolish to rule out anything) then it would be reasonable to assume his cabinet may be similar in appearance to the final group he assembled in desperation in July.
In his brief time since departing Defra, George Eustice has mostly maintained a diplomatic silence about the actions of his successor and indeed Tory matters generally.
This counts in his favour, along with his deep knowledge of the brief which will be attractive to any successor who will be desperate for an outbreak of competence.
Yet if it was Johnson, Eustice’s wholehearted support for Rishi Sunak in the previous Tory leadership election would count against him, as he was seen by Boris loyalists as the wielder of the knife that brought down their bumptious blonde bombshell.
Given there was widespread support for Sunak among MPs it would be impossible for him to purge all proponents of the pint-size yet teetotal representative for Richmond, Yorkshire.
Victoria Prentis, the previous farming minister, was also a fervent Sunak backer but is a canny cross-party operator.
Her lower profile within the party may mean her support for Sunak could be more easily overlooked and she managed to stay on the government payroll under Truss with a role at the Department for Work and Pensions.
She would have been quietly furious at chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s reversal of Kwasi Kwarteng’s introduction of VAT-free shopping in the disastrous mini budget, a measure of big importance to Bicester Village retail park in her North Oxfordshire constituency.
I’d lay a fiver of someone else’s money on her being the next environment secretary.
Mark Spencer, the current farming minister and Johnson’s former chief whip, was yet another backer of Rishi Sunak.
He has managed to skirt around much of the hot water his departmental boss Ranil Jayawardena has landed himself in with much of the green lobby, but will be seen as too close to farmers to get the top job.
He’s my pick to be a rare survivor in post by Christmas.
Jayawardena, the youngest member of the outgoing cabinet, saw his inexperience at leading a full department brutally exposed and that, along with the fact he is seen as a full Truss loyalist, means I would be surprised if he did not get a rapid demotion.
I cheerfully look forward to being proved utterly wrong in all my predictions by 10 more unforeseen developments before Monday.