Should Tories already be feeling buyer’s remorse over their new leader? It has been only 20 days since Boris Johnson, a liberal who pretended to be a populist, was replaced by Liz Truss, a liberal who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a liberal. Whereas Johnson’s was a patrician liberalism with a keen sense of public opinion, Truss is an economic liberal with a swot’s enthusiasm and a swot’s grasp of human instincts. In short, the Tories have swapped a lazy dissembler for an ardent geek.

It’s not all they’ve swapped. The communitarian shift that began under Theresa May has been set in reverse and libertarianism has regained the upper hand in the Tory party. The decision to pursue supply-side fiscal reforms, specifically cutting the top rate of income tax to the Thatcher-achieved level of 40 per cent, is the most obvious sign of that, but there are others: cancelling the planned rise in corporation tax and scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses. Kwasi Kwarteng hopes these and other measures such as low-tax investment zones, a cut to stamp duty and lighter-touch regulation will act like a dose of epinephrine on the economy’s cardiovascular system. It’ll get the blood pumping again.

At least that’s the theory. The markets are unconvinced, the economists are sceptical, civil society is aghast and the equality industry is appalled. For more than a century now, anything resembling economic liberalism has been greeted in a similar fashion and supply-siders like to remind everyone of the infamous letter to the Times, signed by 364 economists, warning against the monetarist policies of Geoffrey Howe’s 1981 Budget. Maybe Kwarteng’s Growth Plan will prove the naysayers wrong too, but then, as now, a good chunk of those naysayers come from within the conservative fold.

Back then, it was the ‘wets’ and their attachment to the paternalism that made up the Tory half of the Butskellite consensus. Today, it is a motley crew of populists, nationalists, post-liberals and common good conservatives. They had been encouraged by what appeared to be a drift away from tax-cuts-and-visas conservatism, in which the City was forever being appeased like a pagan god with the sacrifices of low taxation and free movement of people. Their efforts to nudge their various priorities (the popular will, national coherence, public virtue) closer to the heart of centre-right politics and policymaking have, in the short term at least, been dealt a severe blow by Kwarteng’s Growth Plan. The old gods are scarfing down their new oblations.

Where their dismay may soon turn to despair is on immigration. According to the Sun, the government is set to announce an expansion of the number of jobs on the shortage occupations list and an increase in numbers and duration of stay under the seasonal workers scheme. One of the ironies of Brexit is that, rather than the festival of racist hatred talked up by its more dishonest opponents, leaving the EU has led to a rise in non-European migration to the UK. While this gives the lie to so much tedious smuggery about Britain being a ‘rainy fascist island’, it remains the case that regaining control over borders and immigration was one of the top three reasons for voting Leave.

Immigration has cooled as an issue since the Brexit vote, with the percentage of voters listing it as their top concern falling from 56 per cent ahead of the referendum to 26 per cent today. Yet the potential for increases in migrant numbers to reverse this trend, even in the middle of a labour shortage, will be another test of whether Brexit was a vote merely for control of immigration or for low immigration. The Tories must also contend with the evaporation of their lead on the issue. When Keir Starmer took over as Labour leader, the Conservatives enjoyed a 23-point lead over the opposition on ‘best at handling asylum and immigration’. That advantage now stands at one point. Against this backdrop, an increase in migration could prove politically toxic among the new voter coalition the Tories have put together.

The bigger threat, both to the post-Brexit softening of attitudes and to the Tories’ electoral viability, is illegal immigration. According to the BBC, more than 31,000 people have arrived in the UK so far this year via small boat crossings in the Channel, already higher than the figure for the entirety of 2021. By my own calculations, some 27,015 migrants have arrived via boat since the government announced its Rwanda policy in April: and 4,616 of them in the short time Liz Truss has been Prime Minister. I come at this problem as an immigration liberal: I think migration should be safe, sustainable and legal and boat crossings are none of those. In fact, they undermine all three principles.

Yet despite the threat to Britain’s border integrity and national sovereignty, and despite the sheer scale of the numbers, we are still to hear anything from Liz Truss’s government that would reduce, let alone end boat crossings. Yes, it’s still very early days in her premiership and most of her time so far has been taken up by the death of the Queen, but the Prime Minister ignores this problem at her peril. As I’ve argued before, the longer the Tories take to get a handle on boat crossings, the greater the likelihood that another Ukip-style party will come along and capture the issue.

There are other developments that perhaps should raise an eyebrow among right-wingers, such as the news that Michelle Donelan, Nadine Dorries’ replacement as culture secretary, intends to ‘re-examine the business case’ for selling Channel 4. This, you would have thought, would be a point of consensus for Trussian liberals (generally in favour of privatisation) and cultural conservatives (who see Channel 4 as a bastion of the institutional left). Right-wingers were taken in by Boris Johnson’s schtick and had begun to figure out just how profoundly they had been hoodwinked when the left, the media and the Tory benches came for him, prompting the grassroots to swing back in behind him.

Truss may well be bound for the same trajectory. She is a liberal and has no instinct for populism, nationalism or cultural conservatism in the way that even Margaret Thatcher did. Sooner or later, the party members who voted for her and the right-wing commentators who endorsed her will come to realise that. By which point, she will already be under heavy artillery fire from the same forces ranged against Boris, and the Tory instinct to close ranks will kick in. What all of this means for the next election is anyone’s guess, except to say that it appears unlikely to result in a Conservative victory. As things stand, the next occupant of No. 10 looks set to be either Labour or the first Liberal Prime Minister since Lloyd George.