IT had to happen. Liz Truss had to go.

She had run of authority, run out of credibility, run out of support, run out of road on which to perform her U-turns…

Read more: Liz Truss resigns as Prime Minister in Downing Street statement

The Northern Echo:

In front of the famous Downing Street black door, she completed her final screeching U-turn. Almost exactly 24 hours earlier, she had said she was a fighter not a quitter, but after an evening of unfathomable chaos, she realised the fight was lost and she quit.

The history books tell us what an extraordinary, unprecedented, moment this was, which speaks volumes about the state of the country. Ms Truss became the ultimate pub quiz question as her 44 days in office make her the shortest serving Prime Minister in 300 years – she didn’t even come close to overtaking George Canning’s 119 days before he died in 1827.

It was only three-and-a-half months since Boris Johnson stood on the same spot and announced his resignation, and within a week Britain will have its third Prime Minister of the year, its fifth PM in five years.

Who will it be who takes on this most poisoned of chalices?

Rishi Sunak

The Northern Echo:

The Richmond MP came second to Ms Truss in the leadership election, despite winning over the largest number of MPs, and his reputation has been greatly enhanced in the intervening weeks. He predicted the meltdown that Ms Truss’s economic policies would cause, but he has stayed quietly in North Yorkshire without screaming “I told you so”.

However, there are major obstacles in his way. On one side, the Boris Johnson supporters still blame him for bringing down their man, and on the other side, traditional Tories still blame him for putting up taxes to the highest level since the Second World War.

On the plus side, he is sensible and managerial and would not be prone to Truss-like flights of unbalanced fancy.

Odds: 13/8

Penny Mordaunt

The Northern Echo:

Came an impressive third in the leadership election and handled herself impressively earlier in the week at the Despatch Box when Ms Truss was hiding under her desk. She is a cleanskin. She doesn’t come with the baggage of Mr Sunak, so she may be the unity candidate that the deeply divided Tories are desperately seeking.

However, the party has just seen the tumultuous twists and turns of politics chew up and spit out Ms Truss, who had been a government minister for a decade, in only a month-and-a-half; putting faith in someone as inexperienced as Ms Mordaunt is a big gamble.

Odds: 9/2

Ben Wallace

The Northern Echo:

Rhe Defence Secretary is seen as the safest pair of hands and the greyest of heads. In a time of such sensational upheaval, such a drab figure could be the unity candidate.

Odds: 10/1

Boris Johnson

The Northern Echo:

As extraordinary as it seems for a man who resigned at the start of the summer with financial, probity and partygate scandals closing in on him, Mr Johnson is fourth favourite, and he is still popular in the country – indeed, having lanced the boil of scandals by resigning, he is more popular now than he was at the start of the year.

He also is the only candidate with a mandate, having won a landslide in 2019 with support from untraditional areas like the North East.

This would to some extent undermine the opposition’s demands for a general election, but it would be the most remarkable comeback since Lazarus came back from the dead.

Odds: 16/1

There will be other names. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary until yesterday afternoon, released a poisonous resignation letter that suggests that she too would like to stand as the right-wing standard bearer; Kemi Badenoch, one of the surprises of the leadership election, will also fancy another shot.

Labour, the LibDems and the SNP will all continue to demand an election, and, given the current “revolving door of chaos”, as Keir Starmer calls it, with the next Tory PM unable to guarantee stability, it is a thoroughly reasonable demand. But, how do we get there? It would have to be through Tory MPs voting no confidence in their own government, and how likely are they to do that when current polls show that they are all likely to be wiped out, especially in red wall areas like our own?

They are not, and with Labour 39 per cent ahead in their Tees Valley seats, their only hope of survival is for a new leader to somehow steady the Tory ship ahead of the general election in two years’ time.

Indeed, with the exception of Bishop Auckland’s Dehenna Davison and Middlesbrough South’s Simon Clarke who have been rewarded for their unequivocal backing of Ms Truss with government jobs, most Tees Valley Tories will be glad that the deed has been done quickly.

It was noticeable that Jill Mortimer, the Hartlepool MP, was one of a score of MPs who called publicly for Ms Truss to stand down. Ms Mortimer, who is not often in the headlines, was elected in a by-election in May 2021 which was the high watermark of Mr Johnson’s popularity, and it was his positive levelling up message that helped turn the town Tory for the first time since 1959. She, though, saw the levelling up agenda lose prominence, first of all, under Ms Truss and then finance, as Jeremy Hunt’s new era of austerity dawned.

It was also noticeable that an MP like Darlington’s Peter Gibson didn’t disown Ms Truss, but reading between the lines of his Facebook commentary, he expressed worries about her when he wrote: “It concerns me greatly that Westminster events overshadow the hard work that myself and our hard working councillors are doing.”

Conservative-run Darlington council faces elections in May, as do several Tees Valley councils. There were already local concerns among grassroots members that with Ms Truss as leader, they would be wiped out, which could even have had an impact on Ben Houchen who could have been left a lame duck mayor if Labour had gained control of the Tees Valley Combined Authority.

To assuage those fears, the Tees Valley Tories are probably relieved that Ms Truss has gone now rather than cling on embarrassingly closer to the May polling date.

And Ms Truss’s last weeks have been embarrassing. On Monday, she looked humiliated and haunted when she belatedly appeared in the Commons to hear her new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt tear up all she had stood for; on Friday, she looked wooden and worried as she cut her press conference short after just four unanswered questions, appearing to be on the verge of tears.

The natural inclination was to feel sorry for someone facing so many public slaps, but Ms Truss’s arrogance is the architect of her own downfall. She selected a cabinet only of her own supporters so there were no voices urging caution, and, with her Chancellor and soulmate Kwasi Kwarteng, she embarked upon an tax-cutting trickledown experiment which was only espoused by right-wing economists.

Perhaps, if she had prepared the ground over a number of years, she might have been successful, but she rushed recklessly in with not even fag packet scribblings to prove that she could fund £45bn of tax cuts at a time when Britain’s spending was soaring due to the energy crisis and the pandemic hangover.

The markets saw through that overweening arrogance and forced her to crash out of her extreme plans, and sack her Chancellor who was putting them into action.

Then she dangled, like a fly on a fishing line, spinning from one embarrassing u-turn to another, until finally the big lips of a fish plucked her off, leaving her as a curious footnote in British political history while the country stares at an enormous crisis uncertain who is going to lead it next.

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