Rishi Sunak is the leaver of the two, but Truss tells Tory members the right fairytales – and they may reward her for it, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland
It’s partly cultural. Sunak could be a mascot for the slick, hi-tech, high-finance, international elite. The billionaire inlaws, the CV, the look. As one Westminster veteran puts it: “He isa Goldman Sachs guy,” even down to his personal manner. He can do affable when the cameras are on, but close up, it’s full “master of the universe stuff”.
Truss’s persona is different. The trace of Yorkshire in the accent, the Thatcher cosplay, coupled with her disavowals of her earlier position – she says she was flat “wrong” to back remain – mean she now has a Brexity vibe. Especially when set against Sunak, who, with his non-dom wife and US green card, could have been one of the very “citizens of nowhere” Theresa May had in mind when she utteredOf course, none of this is fair.
But there is more to the Brexit mood than motifs of class and culture. For the mood is only partly about hostility to Europe. Mainly it’s about hostility to facts. Truss is the true Brexiter in this contest because she subscribes to magical thinking, believing that simply saying something is enough to will it into existence. You just have to close your eyes and wish really, really hard.
Thus she can claim to have “delivered” a solution to the impasse over the Northern Ireland protocol, when in fact she merely introduced a Commons bill that would, if passed, break an international agreement and trigger a possible trade war with the EU. No less hollow is her boast of brokering dozens of trade deals, when in fact, for most of them, she simply did a copy-and-paste on existing EU agreements and “stuck a union jack on top”, as one backbench critic puts it.
But it’s the fantasy economics that proves Truss has been drinking the spirit of Brexit neat. For the leave campaign was built on the delusion that Britain could put up barriers to trade with its closest neighbours and yet become richer as a result. It relied on the likes of maverick economist Patrick Minford, who said a hard Brexit would magic an
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