She's not for turning but Truss can still learn from Thatcher

AS BRITAIN'S third female prime minister, Liz Truss has been able to view one of her predecessors up close but the other only through the lens of her teenage memory.

- Patrick O'Flynn 

She sat in Theresa May's Cabinet throughout May's disastrous Downing Street tenure and saw just what dithering and loss of nerve can do to a premiership.

So who can blame her for reports coming from inside Whitehall that say she has decided to be serene about the blowback from her Chancellor's "fiscal event" of a week ago and is determined not to budge an inch over the policies in it?

No doubt she will, as modern parlance puts it, be "channelling" Margaret Thatcher instead. The Lady is not for turning and all that.

Despite disastrous current opinion polls, putting the Tories suddenly 20 or even 30 points behind Labour, and financial market sentiment turning against the Government, Truss is reportedly utterly convinced she should stick to everything announced in Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-Budget.

That includes the extent and duration of support for household energy bills, terminating the National Insurance increase and abandoning the previous regime's plan to raise corporation tax, as well as scrapping the 45p top rate of tax and the bankers' bonus cap and then pre-scheduling next spring for a reduction in the standard rate of income tax.