The PM has performed a series of screeching U-turns since entering Number 10. But is abandoning a policy always a disaster – or is there a way to get away with it?
Which is the worst U-turn since Liz Truss became prime minister? Sure, you’re going to say the tax cuts for the rich, an absolute by-numbers disaster, from the market crash on the day of the announcement, through days of fresh catastrophe and an absent leader, in flat denial that anything was wrong, to the reversal itself, inelegantly announced (“We get it and we have listened”) to a party and, more importantly, a national economy in disarray. But let me just offer for comparison the lesser-spotted double U-turn: first the Tories were going to make a fuller financial statement on 23 November, then, in a panic, they brought it forward to the end of October, only to push it back to its original date, then, just this week, pulled it forward again. Does U-turn even cover this? Should we be calling it a hokey-cokey?
Clearly, this is a government in unusual straits: it is reaching the point where it wouldn’t even be able to follow through on a sound decision, with its MPs in open rebellion and its polling numbers a galloping disaster. These conditions create ever more tergiversation: opponents have seen the weakness and know that there’s no such thing as a brick wall, only an MDF partition that hasn’t been sledgehammered hard enough, while friends who have been humiliated by defending a position that is later reversed fall silent. But Truss isn’t the first prime minister to U-turn: indeed, every leader will change a position at some time or another.
