Truss faces new perils as restless MPs return to Westminster

Bloomberg

The return of Parliament this week is fraught with danger for UK Prime Minister Liz Truss.
In her first month in office, the 47-year-old premier managed to roil the financial markets, alienate a swath of her lawmakers and sink the Conservative Party in the polls with the biggest set of unfunded tax cuts in half a century.
Since the House of Commons last sat, chasms have opened up over the economic direction Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng are pursuing, and backbenchers smell blood. After forcing the government into a U-turn over its signature tax cut for the highest earners, Tory lawmakers are preparing to challenge their leader over plans to cut welfare benefits, ease planning rules and ramp up borrowing.
“When MPs are on recess there’s more of a limit to plotting but when they return to Westminster they’ll all be in the same place,” said Alice Lilly, senior researcher at the Institute for Government. “That’s going to be more tricky.”
Truss’s missteps mean that despite boasting a 70-odd majority, she finds herself in similar position to Theresa May — whose backbenchers frequently held her 2017-2019 minority government to ransom. The current dissent threatens to stymie the premier’s plan to go for growth through a massive program of deregulation and tax cuts.
At last week’s Tory Party conference, former cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Grant Shapps sounded out restless lawmakers.