Mel Stride promises the Tories won’t repeat the mistakes of Liz Truss – except they already have
The Tories’ economic credibility has collapsed with Liz Truss’s mini-budget. In scapegoating her, they overlook deeper failures. A shallow apology from the shadow chancellor does not win back disillusioned British voters.
What you need to know
🔹 Voter trust in Tory economic competence eroded before Truss’s brief premiership began.
🔹 Conservatives avoided accountability post-defeat, focusing on immigration and tax over services.
🔹 Mel Stride blamed economic chaos solely on Truss, ignoring wider party mismanagement.
🔹 Without reform or real contrition, another Conservative government appears increasingly unlikely.
I t’s a mistake to think that, when it comes to the UK economy, the Conservatives have always been seen by British voters as a safer pair of hands than Labour. But, notwithstanding the damaging austerity imposed on the country by David Cameron’s chancellor, George Osborne, it was, by and large, the case between 2008 and 2022. This was a period bookended by the global financial crisis that occurred under Gordon Brown’s watch as Labour chancellor and then prime minister, and by Liz Truss’s disastrous 49-day stint in the top job.
In reality, people were already beginning to lose faith in the Tories’ economic competence when Truss beat Rishi Sunak in the race to succeed Boris Johnson in Number 10. But she right royally trashed whatever reputation the party still had on that score and, as a result, set it on the road that led to its cataclysmic defeat at the polls last July.
Another leadership race duly followed that election. But instead of using it as an opportunity both to conduct a thorough postmortem and issue a full-throated apology for the mess they’d made of things across a whole range of domestic policy, the candidates stayed largely in the party’s comfort zone.
The country’s crumbling public services got hardly a mention, any acknowledgement of their dire state drowned out by discussion of immigration and taxation. The eventual winner, Kemi Badenoch, was apparently convinced that the Conservatives had lost because they “talked right but governed left”.
Clearly, that message doesn’t seem to have persuaded the public. The Tories are now even more unpopular than they were at the general election. They rarely break 20% in the opinion polls and consistently finish behind not just a very poorly-regarded Labour government but a surging Reform UK.
Cue the decision by Mel Stride, a cabinet minister in Rishi Sunak’s doomed government and now Badenoch’s shadow chancellor, to issue an apology of sorts. This was, however, not an apology for the mess the Conservatives made of the country during 14 (arguably wasted) years in office – but for the month and a half in which they were led by Truss.
Sir Mel (as he is now) was never much of a fan, but he’s now taking public potshots at the former prime minister in a very well-trailed speech. Apparently, it was only during this short period, when Truss delivered her now legendary “mini-budget” that derailed the economy, that it all went wrong.
“For a few weeks,” he declared, “we put at risk the very stability which Conservatives had always said must be carefully protected. The credibility of the UK’s economic framework was undermined by spending billions on subsidising energy bills and tax cuts, with no proper plan for how this would be paid for.”
“Never again,” he continued, “will the Conservative party undermine fiscal credibility by making promises that we cannot afford.” Stride here seemed to be conveniently forgetting that, at least in the judgment of the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, that was exactly what he and his colleagues did when they presented their manifesto to the country at last year’s general election – long after Truss had departed Downing Street.
As such, Stride’s speech is unlikely to impress anyone. Rather than a confession of collective guilt and an acknowledgement of a pattern of behaviour stretching over years, it seeks to deflect the blame onto a one-off event and onto one already-derided individual (or maybe two if one includes the man who actually delivered the bungled mini-budget, Kwasi Kwarteng).
Moreover, such is the presidentialised nature of British politics these days, that, unless a message is delivered by the party leader, it won’t be seen as representing its official position. Nor will it cut through to voters.
More profoundly, Stride’s “contrition” (the closest he got to actually saying sorry) is meaningless because rather than challenge any of his party’s underlying assumptions, it actually doubles down on them.
To stand a chance of signalling to a sceptical public that they’ve truly changed, the Tories need to break out of their essentially Thatcherite-cum-culture-warrior comfort zone. But obsessed (and in some ways understandably so) as they are with the potentially existential threat posed to them by Reform UK, that currently seems like a very distant prospect. And so, therefore, does another Tory government.
Sources:
▪ This piece was originally published in The Conversation and re-published in Europeans TODAY on 5 June 2025. | The author writes in a personal capacity.
▪ Cover: AI-generated image.
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