Tories owe Liz Truss their full support

After a baptism of fire as Conservative leader, Liz Truss will today make her keynote conference speech in Birmingham unsure if she leads a party that is serious about staying in government. The U-turn on the 45p tax rate may have been dismissed as a bump in the road but it goes to the heart of the dilemma the Prime Minister faces.

She wants to challenge the social democratic orthodoxies that have been holding the country back for years by pursuing growth, cutting taxes, encouraging incentives and restraining the expansion of the state. The reduction in the top rate of tax may have been a small matter in terms of revenue forgone, but it was a big part of the message Ms Truss wanted to send out.

Yet her party balked at the prospect and left her and Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor, no option but to abandon it. A defeat in the Commons on a Budget measure would have been far worse. Now, other fights loom over benefits, human rights reforms and changes to the planning system.

Ms Truss has an ambitious set of policies that she set out in the leadership campaign, yet there is now a danger that she will be thwarted at every turn by a fresh coalition of opponents in her own party.

MPS should remember that the Prime Minister won fairly and squarely under the rules after they removed a leader who had delivered an 80-seat majority just three years ago. She did not engineer a coup and, indeed, stayed loyal to Boris Johnson until the end.

Senior backbenchers and former ministers such as Michael Gove and Grant Shapps, who have been in the vanguard of recent criticism, should consider the damage they are doing to the party’s re-election prospects. The only beneficiaries are their political opponents.

Conservative values championing a small state, low taxes and deregulation are being replaced by social democratic nostrums that brook no spending cuts and take the same attitude to wealth creators as the Left. The pandemic lockdowns did not help matters by fostering a widespread sense that the state will always step in to help in difficult times, as it has done again with energy bills.

As we have argued consistently, the UK needs a growth strategy, and Ms Truss is at least providing one. The alternative is to manage the nation’s decline into a high-tax, low-productivity economy. She needs the full support of the parliamentary party in her endeavour, starting today.