She wants to be a new Thatcher

Wolfgang Hansson

Published: Today 15.38 

Updated: Less than 2 hours ago 

This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's. 

COLUMNISTS 

Tough but fair. Ideologically pure. An heiress to Margaret Thatcher.

This is how Liz Truss, Britain's new Prime Minister, wants to be perceived. 

The question is how she manages to maintain that image when she is confronted with millions of Britons who cannot pay their electricity bills. 

In many ways, Liz Truss is the exact opposite of the outgoing Boris Johnson. 

He is a populist who managed to win a landslide victory in the last election by playing down conservative ideology and portraying himself as the best friend of workers. 

Liz Truss has gone through a two-month election campaign to become the new leader of the Conservative Party, basically repeating only two positions. She wants to lower taxes and have as little government interference as possible in society. 

In this way, she has sounded very much like her great role model, Britain's first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. 

 - The principles she believed in were the right principles, Truss asserted in one of the summer's hearings and was met with strong applause. 

It may have been pure tactics. It is not the British people who appointed Truss as the new Prime Minister, but 160,000 members of the Conservative Party. 

Since Truss, who during her time as a student at Oxford was a Liberal Democrat, has a reputation for changing her position very easily if necessary, it may happen that the British will see a new side of her now that she has taken office. 

During the many hearings over the past month, she has refused to answer questions about how she intends to help the British public cope with the extremely high electricity and gas bills expected this winter on top of already high inflation. 

But right on the run, she promised to present a plan after just one week in 10 Downing Street. If she has a chance to win the next election in two years, she can hardly continue to sound adamant and contemptuous of "giving a lot of handouts" to the citizens. 

Labor wins 

If there were an election today, the opposition Labor party would win very clearly, according to opinion polls. So Truss will have to start from scratch. 

It's not just the hard times that mean we can't expect a prime minister as entertaining as during Boris's time in power. Liz Truss has survived well over a decade in various Conservative governments by being loyal, hardworking and dutiful. 

While Rishi Sunak, her main rival for the prime ministership, has been accused of backstabbing Boris Johnson by withdrawing his support, Truss has continued as foreign secretary in Johnson's transition government. Something that benefited her in the leadership battle. 

Many of the Conservative voters would have preferred to see Boris Johnson allowed to continue. To them, Sunak is a traitor. 

With Truss in 10 Downing Street, there will be a little more order in British politics and less shooting from the hip. Hopefully also less careless behavior and fewer scandals. 

But even Liz Truss, like her representative, is skilled at slipping on the truth, even if she does not regularly use the lie as a weapon. 

The 47-year-old former Oxford student likes to portray her upbringing in Leeds as simple and tough, the school she attended as a problem school. The image she wants to give is that she worked her way up from simple conditions to who she is today. 

Don't bother with arguments 

An image contradicted by peers who attended the same school. 

Her father was a maths professor and her mother worked as a nurse, so one can assume she didn't have to leave the dinner table hungry. 

Truss will continue Johnson's foreign policy and invest heavily in a close relationship with the United States. She is at least as strong in her support for Ukraine and in her criticism of Putin as Johnson was. 

Nor will she risk a fight with the EU when it comes to how the border with Northern Ireland should be regulated. 

She supports the law put forward by Johnson in which Great Britain unilaterally removes many of the border controls that currently take place between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Which puts you on a collision course with the EU. 

Before the 2016 referendum, Truss was opposed to Brexit. Since then, she has swung and is in favor. 

Perhaps we will see the same reversal in terms of reluctance to government efforts to solve the many crises the country is facing.