A time to trust Truss
IN the midst of all the brouhaha and great sadness accompanying the death of the Queen last week, another major British event has, quite understandably, become obscured.
In fact, rather than merely being lost to view in a kind of hazy fog, the rise to No 10 Downing St of new Conservative Party leader Liz Truss has found itself pretty much totally sidelined.
The new British prime minister has walked into a bit of a nightmare, though unlike most of those which often occur in politics, it is not one of her own making.
Ms Truss stepped into the top job last Tuesday afternoon British time and only 48 hours later was speaking to the nation from Downing St about the death of their beloved Queen.
At much the same time, King Charles stepped into what was his destiny the moment his mother died at Balmoral Castle, coining it ‘‘the moment I’ve been dreading’’ when Ms Truss had her first audience with him on Friday afternoon.
The probabilities of having two relative newbies at the helm of a country, one the head of the political wing and the other the head of the constitutional monarchy, must be exceedingly low.
It is a little like an organisation discovering it has a new chief executive and a new chairman or woman on the same day, though the necessity of getting it right and the potential complications at play here are many times more important than that.
Whatever your political view of Ms Truss and of the Conservatives, no reasonable person could shrug off just what a bizarre and stressful start it has been for her.
She has had to take a key role in proceedings which no other British prime minister has been involved with since Sir Winston Churchill in 1952, on the death of King George VI and the accession of the Queen. But, unlike Sir Winston with his vast experience and knowledge of the responsibilities of being prime minister, Ms Truss has only been in the job a few days.
It is hard to think of any more important duty which she will carry out during her prime ministership than ensuring a smooth transition for the country out of the second Elizabethan era into the new Carolean age. Talk about peaking early.
The former Liberal Democrat activist, who has been accused of shifting alliances to suit over issues such as Brexit and the legacy of polarising former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, won the race for the leadership on Monday last week more narrowly than expected.
She secured 81,326 votes from party members, about 57.4% of the vote, which is the smallest percentage of any successful leadership challenge since grassroots elections were introduced 21 years ago.
On Tuesday, she was off to Scotland to receive the imprimatur of the Queen, who was too tired to travel to London.
Even politicians can have butterflies in their stomachs, yet the photograph of the new prime minister meeting Her Majesty in front of the Balmoral fire gives no hint of nervousness and instead seems upbeat and cheerful.
For us, it is strange and highly evocative to see those photographs, knowing now that was the last official meeting the Queen attended and they were the last official images of all the millions of pictures taken of her over the years.
But for Ms Truss it must be playing on her mind at night that she was lucky to see the Queen just two days before she died.
Then, on Friday afternoon, to be one of the first outsiders to meet the new king must have felt to her totally surreal.
Perhaps there is some element of just desserts in this for her louche, loquacious and larrikinish predecessor Boris Johnson.
What will he be thinking about unfolding events, now he is on the back benches? Another week and he would have been in the thick of these historymaking days.