WHEN the Conservative leadership contest kicked off, Conservative commentators were confidently predicting that the new leader would benefit from a polling boost.

This would give the Tories a clear lead over Labour and might even prompt the new leader to take advantage of his or her honeymoon period and go for an early election which would both remove any doubt about their mandate to govern and secure Conservative rule until 2028 and beyond.

So how's that working out for the Nasty Party after just a few weeks of Liz Truss as Prime Minister? Like just about everyone who had not drunk deep of the Tories' bile, I thought that Truss would be an unmitigated disaster as prime minister and would prove to be a gift to the Scottish independence movement. However, what neither I or any other commentator had predicted was just how quickly and comprehensively Truss's leadership would implode.

Far from enjoying a boost in public support, a spectacular opinion poll from YouGov this week found that Labour now have a 33-point lead over the Conservatives. Truss had said she was happy to be unpopular, and then along came YouGov saying: "Oh well, you're going to love this then."

The YouGov poll does not appear to be an outlier or rogue poll either – there have been several polls in recent days for which fieldwork was carried out after Kwarteng's hideous monstrosity of a mini-Budget which promised to borrow vast sums in order to introduce a raft of tax cuts which overwhelmingly benefit the rich. All of these polls have given Labour a commanding lead in excess of 20 percentage points. A poll out this morning also gave Labour a 30% lead over the Conservatives.

According to the Polling UK website, an aggregation of recent polls would see Labour on 441 Commons seats, with the Conservatives being reduced to a humiliating rump of just 108. Faced with electoral near-annihilation, there are no good choices left for the Conservatives.

Truss is theoretically safe from a leadership challenge for a year, but even if Tory MPs did find a way of removing her, there would be an explosion of public fury over the Conservatives leaving the country without a government for a second lengthy period during a time of severe crisis and immense pressure for an immediate General Election. And rightly so – it would be an atrocious abdication of responsibility for short-term party-political goals.

But with growing public anger about the mismanagement of the economy by Truss and Kwarteng and rising unrest on the Conservative benches, the chances of a catastrophic political breakdown and a sudden General Election are now high and growing with every poll that shows Tory MPs are facing the loss of seats that were previously considered safe.

The Tories are ruthless when it comes to ditching leaders that they think are not going to win them an election, and in Truss's short tenure in office, she has already proven to be an unmitigated disaster. The question facing Tory MPs is: if she is performing this badly when she has the goodwill that comes from being new to office and many in the party and the wider public are prepared to give her the benefit of any doubt, just how poorly is she going to do once the public has made up its mind that she's dreadful?

The quandary for Tory MPs is that the public appear to have already made up their minds about Truss, and their verdict is scathing.

The least worst option for Tory MPs is to press on in the hope that the immediate crisis will pass and something will turn up to save the Conservatives from themselves. However, the party has lumbered itself with a Prime Minister with the charisma of a broken toaster and the presentation skills of a five-year-old having a temper tantrum.

Truss has neither the talent nor the ability to persuade a dubious public that lumbering them with massive rises to their rent or mortgages and slashing their public services in order to give tax cuts to millionaires really is something that should make them vote Tory. However, that will merely compound the damage that Truss is doing.

Tory MPs might measure the damage in opinion poll points, but the rest of us suffer the damage in terms of freezing homes, unaffordable bills and sleepless nights worrying about paying the rent or the mortgage.

For the greater good, Truss needs to go now, and the longer that she remains in office wreaking havoc, the more catastrophic the situation becomes, and the greater the inevitable defeat for the Conservative Party.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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