It can be said that I have made a deliberate attempt in the last few months to restrict commentary to Nigerian affairs. This is not to say that international affairs can be ignored all the time especially in an increasingly globalised world governed as it is by a social string theory which suggests that a small event in one obscure corner of the world can lead to cataclysmic events in some geographically distant part of the globe. It is not unexpected therefore that what happens in distant parts of the world should at least sometimes be of interest to people in other parts of a world which is now served by extensive media communications which deliver stories in real time to all parts of the inhabitable globe.
One of the more outstanding news stories of the week has been the ascension of Liz Truss to the office of British Prime Minister after a long drawn out leadership contest of the Conservative Party against Rishi Suniak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government of Boris Johnson. It was the resignation of Suniak from Johnson’s cabinet that led to Boris stepping down from office in which case, it is something of poetic justice that Suniak has not gone all the way in benefitting from his role in bringing down the Johnson cabinet. Although Suniak was the poster boy of the campaign and was the obvious front runner for a long while, he was overtaken on the home stretch by Liz Turss. There are some who ascribed his loss in the leadership to the fact that through his wife he was sitting on assets in the dollar billionaire range and was therefore far from being the man next doors to a vast majority of the British populace. Whatever the reason for Suniak’s fall at the last hurdle in the Tory leadership race, the goings in within the Conservative Party has raised a raft of interesting points some of which are worthy of interrogation.
The emergence of Liz Truss as British Prime Minister is worthy of considerable interrogation from the point of view of democratic principles and practice. As we speak, the ruling Conservative Party, in spite of her healthy majority in parliament in running behind the Labour Party in the polls. This suggests that in the event of a general election today, the Tories are likely to lose power. But they are not only safe but have decided on who was to become the Prime Minister following an election in which there were only 174,000 eligible voters, this being the number of men and women who are registered members of the Conservative Party. One is left to wonder if this does not violate the right of the British electorate in deciding who their leader should be. Truss is Prime Minister in spite of the British electorate rather than because of it but this is only one of the more bizarre qualities of Western democracy these days following the rather unexpected results of recent elections in Britain and the USA when their respective full electorates were invited to make their choice; first in the referendum which led to the exit of Britain from the European Union and then in the election of Donald Trump as the President of the USA. Both results were suggestive of a dissonance with the state of politics in both countries. The first casualty of the Brexit vote was David Cameron the now largely forgotten British Prime Minister who badly misjudged the temperature of the water he was plunging into on the issue of Brexit and was boiled and his political career abruptly terminated. It is interesting that one of his friends Jacob Reese-Mogg, one of the most vociferous supporters of Brexit is still swimming in the warm waters of British politics and has just been appointed into the Truss cabinet. Over in the USA, the country is still struggling to recover from the trauma of the Trump presidency which divided the country into roughly equal halves of bitterly opposed groups in deadly partisan combat. It is interesting to note that in spite of her being on the losing side in the Brexit disaster, the Teflon coated Truss has come up smelling of roses and is now an enthusiastic supporter of Brexit. Her Remain coat has been shrugged off in the way of a snake shedding its skin and she is now basking in the sunshine of approval at least as far as the Brexit besotted Conservatives are concerned.
A very interesting aspect of the political career of Truss is her ability to move from one entrenched position without suffering any consequences of her decision to change tack. In the first place this the daughter of committed left wing parents started life on the street as a strong supporter of left wing politics espoused by her parents who took her out on street protests against Margaret Thatcher when she made her move against the unions, especially the miners’ union led by Arthur Scargil. Truss entered Cambridge as a left wing Social Democrat to study the composite degree of Politics Philosophy and Economics, the staple course for aspiring British politicians. Somewhere along the line however she abandoned her left wing convictions and crossed over to the Conservative Party. She still had vestiges of her left wing past when she joined the Tories as she held on to her anti-monarchist views which embarrassed her new political friends. It is quite ironic that she got her instrument of office from the queen a couple of days ago. But then the irony would have not mattered a jot as she has now probably forgotten that she once harboured such inappropriate anti-egalitarian views at any time in her adult life. An even cursory look at Truss’ antecedents will show that she her developed her a raft of inconsistencies into a solidly consistent ideological and social base so that she is all things to all men and has benefitted immensely from her flip flops. She has announced on her second day in office, a massive £130 billion energy bill payout, a move she had denounced only a couple of weeks before. Another sign of a politician who has raised pragmatism to an art form. If she was Nigerian she would have been a member of all the major political parties at one time or the other and probably a member of every cabinet in her various parties.
Truss is no doubt a slippery political operator and more than that a daughter of her time. She benefitted from a Cameron plan to increase the number of female and minority Members of Parliament on the Tory backbenches and entered parliament in 2005 under the tutelage of a senior male MP. This mentorship arrangement turned out to be a disaster for her mentor with whom she had an affair which led to the collapse of his marriage. Although she was also married at the time the ensuing scandal left her marriage untouched and she, together with her husband and two daughters have since moved into 10 Downing Street, the iconic official residence of the British MP. She is nothing if not a survivor. Times have changed indeed. In times past she would have been fed to the wolves and forgotten. But now, standards have changed drastically and a man who boasted of ‘grabbing them (women) by the pussy’ was voted into the White House by a comfortable majority. Whatever is next?
Truss has announced her cabinet and in a startling departure from the orthodox has packed it with only those she is friendly with. It is therefore clear that she has no interest in presiding over healthy debates in cabinet meetings. Not a single person who supported her opponent in the lead up to the leadership election survived the savagery of her onslaught and as matters stand, it is clear that because of the political colour of her cabinet, the departed Boris Johnson retains his pernicious influence on the Truss cabinet. So, it is more of the same as long as Truss is in charge.
A lot can be said about the diversity that exists in the Truss cabinet but that diversity is only in terms lf gender and race. For the first time in the history of democratic rule in Britain there is not a single white man in any of the top four posts in a British cabinet. The Chancellor of the Exchequer who lives cheek to jowl with the PM on Downing Street is male but was born to parents who arrived from Ghana In the sixties whilst the male Foreign Sectary has maternal roots in Sierra Leone and the last member of that powerful quartet of the current British government is like the PM, a woman but of Indian and Mauritanian descent. Mention should of course be made in this context of Kemi Badenoche as she is of obvious Nigerian parentage.
The members of the Truss cabinet may be diverse in many ways but actually their politics has a disturbing sameness, all of them living in the heaven of right wing convictions following their elitist upbringing in a country where the minority right wing rules. The question is, was this a pre-meditated move to bring a contrived diversity the British government or has Truss simply decided to appoint her cronies into government at the expense of merit and experience? The answer is blowing in the wind. Whatever her motive, the face if Britain has been changed, perhaps forever and nobody knows what the result of this will be. Whatever does happen, it appears that Truss is in charge but one cannot help but wonder for how long.