The chaos is just beginning. I know that what Liz Truss did - by blowing up the finances with a massive uncosted cut to taxes was the main cause of this, but one massive problem that the Tory party is going to have to face in the next few weeks is the Suella Braveman problem. Suella is on the right of the party, she wants immigration down to the 10s of thousands, and she's correct in saying that was actually a manifesto commitment in 2019. She's basically willing to go to war for this, but the left of the party absolutely don't want this. Similarly, the right of the party absolutely do not want to increase public spending, but the left of the party will absolutely not vote to cut the things necessary to reduce public spending. The right of the party want to frack, the left absolutely do not. Yesterday, 40 Tory MPs abstained from a whipped vote to prevent a complete ban in fracking. That's right, 40 Tory MPs defied their party, refusing to allow fracking
in principle even though everyone knows that fracking can't happen
in practice anyway.
There is no set of policy goals that the whole of the tory party can now support, and there's no one with the legitimacy to force them into line. They can't face a general election because they know they'd lose. So their best case scenario is they do nothing for the next 2 years and hope that nothing blows up in their faces. But in reality sooner or later something will happen that will either cause the right wing of the party to blow up the party, or the left wing of the party to defect to Labour. I think at this point the most likely scenario is Boris Johnson returns, a large chunk of MPs defect to Labour, and either Johnson loses his majority or is forced to call an election anyway on the basis that he needs a new mandate to actually get anything done.