Margaret Thatcher’s part in Liz Truss’s spectacular downfall

Liz Truss must take personal blame for driving the economy off a cliff, but she was also victim of a Tory mindset that constantly nagged “What would Maggie do?’ What Truss and her fellow zealots forgot was that Mrs Thatcher was a far cannier – and more cautious – politician than her latter-day tax-slashing tribute act, writes Tim Bale

The entire Tory party continues to treat Thatcher as an icon rather than the canny, cautious, and occasionally contradictory politician she really was (Getty Images)

Liz Truss has been called many things – many of them unprintable. Given what she did to the country’s economy, people’s mortgage repayments and the Tories’ poll ratings, that’s hardly surprising. But it still shouldn’t let her party off the hook.

Obviously, Truss, along with her similarly clever-silly chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, can’t wholly escape personal responsibility for what happened. After all, it was ultimately her decision to push through a tax-cutting mini-budget that, together with her refusal to let the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) take a look at it first, was almost bound to spook the markets.

Yet to heap all the blame and opprobrium on Truss herself is to understate the extent to which her decisions were a product of a mindset, a curse even, that has afflicted the Conservative Party for well over three decades – namely that the key to solving Britain’s socio-economic problems will always lie in asking – “What would Maggie do?”