Before Truss was elected tory leader and PM, I wrote the following.

“I’ve been following the Truss - Sunak debates in the half-fascinated way one stares at a car crash. I find myself impelled to wonder what a vulgar Marxist analysis would look like. What class interests do the two represent, and are they the same? Sunak is a banker and he and his wife are obscenely wealthy. Not much room for debate there: finance capital. He may not repeat Boris’s “bugger business” mantra, but I doubt that he would ever want to clip the wings of finance capital to help national businesses or the lives of ordinary citizens. Truss resembles Johnson to the extent that she will clearly do or say almost anything to become Prime Minister. Thatcher was probably the last UK tory leader able to balance a commitment to the free flow of capital with jingoistic nationalism, and when they clashed (should the replacement Atlantic Conveyer be built in South Korea?) she was willing to fudge a bit. But with rare exceptions such as this, the jingoism was window-dressing and the opposition to anything that would challenge the power of capital was the rocklike fundament.

Truss wants to assume what she and her admirers present as Thatcher’s mantle (although like all of the tories she suppresses the fact that her party eventually gave the iron lady the boot). She shares with Thatcher impeccable middle-class credentials, and unlike Sunak has the right ethnic background to appeal to knuckle-dragging racists in her party. But having gone this far I wonder: would a UK led by one of the leadership candidates be significantly different from a UK led by the other? So far the debates have not provided any evidence that this would be the case.”

Now that Truss has been in charge for over a month, what have we learned? To start with, that we are not going to find out anything of great significance from trying to work out what Truss really believes. Even more than Johnson, she will say anything that keeps her in power and satisfies her power base. But what is that power base? Clearly there is an ideological grouping within the tory party that wants to reduce the state to next-to-nothing, for example bleeding the NHS dry so that healthcare will fall more completely into the hands of private capital. But in Westminster, tory MPs have interests, among which the desire to be re-elected and to maintain a tory government are not without force. It’s worth recalling that Corbyn came to power because in the right-wing attempt to reduce the power of the unions in the Labour Party, the membership was significantly expanded and given greater power. But now that right-wing Labour is firmly in control, those elements of the ruling class that want to maintain a certain degree of domestic stability are happy to see the tories voted out and the new, safe Labour Party voted in. (Is is not incredible that with an estimated 200,000 members having left the Labour party in a couple of years, no-one in the leadership has regretted this or sought to persuade members to stay in?) It is hard to see that a Labour Government led by Starmer can deal in any significant way with the major issues that have led to the tory collapse in the polls. Housing, cost of living, the gig economy, the energy crisis: nothing I have read suggests to me that this issues will be seen to be being tackled successfully by a Starmer-led government.