Truss’ time is up, perhaps as early as next week. There are rumours of 100 letters of no confidence having already gone into the 1922 committee chair Graham Brady. And the verdict of the Asian financial markets to the Bank of England ending the purchase of long-dated government gilts will be known by Monday morning.
If it's bad, she will be toast very quickly.
All of which leaves Kwarteng's replacement Jeremy Hunt in line to become an even shorter serving chancellor than Kwarteng.
Reports are emerging about behind-the-scenes moves to ‘coronate’ Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt in which case Hunt may be removed from The Treasury, making his successor the fifth chancellor this year. That may be Sunak of course who will simply get his old job back, but he will become the fifth new incumbent of No 11 since the summer.
I read on Twitter some Tories who think they can, by some miracle, recover from the utterly dire polling before the next election to achieve a win. This is delusional. Things haven't even gotten as bad as they are going to get. The words of Britain's Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1914 keep coming back: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Except, of course, Britain will be on the front line this time. The coming winter will be bleak.
I was born in early 1947, during the longest and coldest winter of the century. We were a family of six (I was the youngest) living in a 3-bedroomed council house and we survived. It wasn't easy and my parents were both of a hardy generation that was thankful for a coal fire and a hot water bottle. The lights were kept on and we had enough food and coal - just - because of rationing. Seventy-five years later and many people won't even have that.
By this time next year, the Tories will be lucky to be polling in single figures - even if they are still in government.
No doubt some would like to see Boris Johnson return but he is behind it all, the reason Truss is in Downing Street. It is claimed he and his supporters engineered the leadership election so that Truss and Sunak were the last two, knowing the members would opt for the loose cannon instead of Sunak. This was supposed to force MPs to demand he be reinstated when it all went pear-shaped.
Nobody expected it to get this bad, this quickly.
Voters have lost trust in the Tories. As Phillip Hammond, a former chancellor himself said, Truss has trashed the Conservatives' reputation for the sound financial management of the economy. It will take a generation or two to restore it.
