The Conservative Party in Britain won a landslide victory less than three years ago with the largest majority in 40 years. According to the latest YouGov poll, it is now trailing the Labour Party 28 per cent to 43 per cent. What a difference three years make!

The Conservatives have elected Liz Truss as their new leader and prime minister. She faces formidable problems that will hardly allow her to take a deep breath. The inflation rate is expected to quadruple by the end of the year and hit 18 per cent by next year. Household energy bills have risen by 80 per cent since the start of the year and will naturally increase further as the winter sets in. Brexit remains unfinished business with the Northern Ireland Protocol in dispute. Scotland is insisting on another referendum to determine whether it will secede from the United Kingdom.

How the new prime minister tackles these crises will determine the fortunes of the Conservatives before the next elections, due in the next two years. Like all new leaders when they take the helm, Liz Truss has a short window in which to make a lasting impact — in her case, perhaps no more than three months.

Understandably, she has made curtailing inflation and energy costs her first order of business. She would have been well advised to include restoring unity in her party in that list. The Conservatives are in a bitterly divided state. She was not the preferred choice among her parliamentary colleagues. Her main rival and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak secured more parliamentary votes in all five preliminary rounds before the final vote was taken among the wider party membership.

The Labour Party in Britain has long been regarded as the party that accommodates ethnic diversity. To her credit (or peril), Liz Truss has named the most diverse Cabinet in British history, appointing non-white persons to the most senior Cabinet posts — Kwasi Kwarteng of Ghanaian origin as chancellor of the exchequer, James Cleverly of Sierra Leone ancestry as foreign minister, Suela Braverman of Indian parents as home secretary, Nadhim Zahawi of Iraqi origin to be in charge of the Cabinet Office, and Kemi Badenoch of Nigerian parentage as minister responsible for international trade. Time will tell whether the British voters will credit or punish her for this.

However, the exclusion from the Cabinet of Sunak and several senior Conservative members who supported him is hardly the way to heal wounds, build trust and restore unity. It would be like Hugh Shearer excluding Clem Tavares from his 1967 Cabinet, PJ Patterson excluding Portia Simpson Miller from his 1992 Cabinet, or Portia excluding Peter Phillips from her 2006 Cabinet.

Liz Truss starts out with a worryingly low approval rating of just over 20 per cent among the British public. Without the assured support of the Conservative members in the Parliament, the new prime minister’s best efforts in tackling Britain’s current crises are more likely to flounder than succeed. At such a low approval rating, the only way is not necessarily up; it may be to stand still.

In a competitive democracy, a party divided against itself can hardly expect to be victorious against a united party, no matter what its shortcomings may be. The Labour Party has had its fair share of divisiveness, but under Keir Starmer it seems to have coalesced and polls suggest that it has recovered much of the support that it had lost to the Liberal Democrats. It has not ignited the kind of hope and excitement that it did under Tony Blair when he reimaged the party in the 1990s but it is consistently ahead of the Conservatives in public opinion polls.

Opting to walk on broken bottles with the likes of Sunak, Grant Shapps, Steve Barclay, Dominic Raab, Greg Clark, Johnny Mercer, Andrew Stephenson, Michael Gove, and Priti Patel — all senior and well-respected Conservative members — sitting on the back benches is a risky gambit. Some have already signalled that they will offer “critical” support to her Government. She is likely to spend more time looking over her shoulder than looking forward at a time when she can least afford to do that. The 1922 Committee could well be placed on standby even before the next elections. Lyndon Johnson’s dictum as to the preferred direction in which urine should be expelled has its wisdom.

The pendulum is also energised in the United States. Mid-term elections are notoriously unfavourable to parties that have just taken control of the White House. Up to three months ago, pundits projected that the Democrats would lose control of both the House and the Senate as polls showed the Republicans maintaining a consistent lead over the Democrats in the lead-up to the November elections. That has now been reversed, assisted, no doubt, by the Supreme Court’s repudiation of the 50-year-old Roe v Wade decision. The Democrats performed above expectations in all the recent congressional special elections.

President Joe Biden, with some significant legislative successes under his belt, has hit the campaign trail and is cleverly seeking to draw a sharp distinction between destructive “MAGA” Republicans and “good” Republicans — something that even Republican leaders, with the exception of a few like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who are uncomfortable with Donald Trump’s leadership lack the cojones to do. It may well work to the advantage of the Democrats in November.

The choice of Trump-backed election-results-denying and conspiracy-theory-spouting candidates in the Republican primaries who are likely to be unpopular among independent voters and even some moderate Republicans has caused Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to express concern that “candidate quality” could damage the party’s chances in the elections. So, too, could Trump’s insistence on making his 2020 election loss and the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago the main focus of the campaign rather than issues like inflation and immigration. The pendulum is being impacted.

We have seen that pendulum at work in the Caribbean in Grenada, Barbados, St Lucia, and Jamaica.

Pendulum motion is a phenomenon of physics, responding to the forces of tension and gravity. The speed and frequency with which it swings in one direction or the other depend on the source and direction of the energy that is applied. Finding that energy is the challenge that all political leaders face, in or out of office.

— Bruce Golding served as Jamaica’s eighth prime minister from September 11, 2007 to October 23, 2011.