Marr: It's deranged to think Truss will be ousted - but a sudden political collapse is perfectly possible

29 September 2022, 18:16

It is "deranged" to believe Liz Truss will be ousted as Prime Minister despite the financial turbulence her mini-budget has created, Andrew Marr has said.

But the presenter of LBC's Tonight with Andrew Marr warned some kind of political collapse is "perfectly possible" - possibly resulting in an early election.

His comments came as one poll, from YouGovt for the Times, put Labour on a commanding 33-point lead, on 54% of the vote.

Andrew said on Thursday's show: "This isn't going well. The pound, I'm glad to say, is doing a little better but the political crisis is intensifying. An utterly jaw dropping poll has just dropped giving the Labour Party a 33 point lead over the Tories which seems to be the biggest for any party since the 1990s.

"Now this is meant to be Liz Truss's honeymoon period and I know this is only one poll but asked how well she's doing, 15% said well and 65% said badly.

"What's the next move for the Conservative Party? These unfunded tax cuts the markets hate, they're not going to change.

"Liz Truss made that clear in a series of most unfortunate radio interviews earlier today. And the people - the Prime Minister and the Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, responsible for what's happening to our currency and mortgage rates - well, they are not going to change either.

"The idea of Tory MPs launching some kind of coup against the prime minister, just weeks into the job, is a deranged fantasy. Fair enough, you may say, just like almost everything else in British public life right now. Good point.

"Except this is a deranged fantasy which is also not going to happen. Nor do I think Truss is about to sack her Chancellor.

"His ideas are her ideas. His budget was her budget. Sacking him would be, in a slightly weird way, very close to sacking herself - sacking her own programme for leadership, sacking her agenda in government.

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Andrew Marr takes aim at Liz Truss after she was questioned by local radio hosts

"No change in policy, no change direction, no change in personnel. And yet the polling and the market reactions remain hideous for the Tories, fear is growing about mortgage rates and, as we learned today, the new prime minister is really very bad at making a case for her own policies.

"Asked direct, relevant, brutal questions by a succession of local radio hosts, Liz Truss stuttered, dodged, ignored - but most dangerously of all, she simply went silent. There's almost nothing as unsettling in speech radio as unexpected silence…

"Ministers say this is a crisis caused by market failure to understand what they're trying to do.

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"In which case, they have no alternative but to explain better. And today suggested they can't. Yikes. And also eek. I dread to think what Tory conference is going to be like.

"But there's one other part of this economic crisis which hasn't had nearly enough attention. Coming down the tracks next, unless ministers are even now changing course in their Whitehall offices, is a tight squeeze on public spending - the NHS, schools, local government, policing – from a Chancellor who today refused to say he would stick by his predecessor's promise to uprate benefits for the poorest by inflation.

"We've had one set of cuts, tax cuts, which haven't gone down well. Just wait for the next helping, the spending cuts. As soon as the Commons finally returns Truss and Kwarteng are going to have to sell all of that to Tory MPs who are already mutinous.

"So how will this end? Haven't a scooby. But the situation at the top of politics is now very fragile and some kind of sudden collapse is perfectly possible. I wouldn't even rule out an early general election, except of course, because of that poll."