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Louise Thomas
Editor
Liz Truss has claimed that the Tories would have performed better at July’s general election if she had clung on as prime minister.
The ex-PM, who sensationally lost her seat in the party’s landslide defeat, said that if she had not been forced out of Downing Street in the wake of her disastrous September 2022 mini-Budget, she would have secured a better result for the Conservatives than Rishi Sunak.
In a packed event on the sidelines of the Tory conference, Ms Truss admitted that winning the general election would have been “a tall order”.
But she said she would have been able to stop the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK if she had been given enough time to let her tax-cutting policies take effect.
In the end, Ms Truss lost her South West Norfolk seat to Labour’s Terry Jermy, with Reform taking thousands of votes from the former PM.
Addressing the most high-energy event of the conference so far, Ms Truss told the Tory rank and file: “When I was in No 10, Reform was polling at 3 per cent. By the time we got to the election, I think they got 18 per cent, because we promised change that we did not deliver.
“Now of course, without the support of the parliamentary party, it was very difficult for me to get my changes through.”
Asked whether she would have done better than Mr Sunak, she said yes. But asked whether she could have won, she said: “I think our best chance would have been to keep Boris. I think it was a very stupid move of some of my colleagues that undermined Boris, and they still haven’t admitted that.
“But I think the second-best option was pursuing the economic policies that would have started to show we can change things.”
Britain’s top polling guru Professor Sir John Curtice has said that the Tories’ defeat, the worst in the party’s history, was mainly due to Ms Truss’s mini-Budget and the Partygate scandal that engulfed Mr Johnson.
In a wide-ranging Q&A on Monday, Ms Truss also:
- Took aim at Theresa May’s botched 2017 general election campaign, which saw her squander the party’s majority in parliament
- Said she would not endorse any of the four Tory leadership contenders, adding that they have not “acknowledged how bad things are”
- Restated her support for Donald Trump in the US presidential race
- Repeated her claim that the Bank of England was to blame for the 2022 bond market crisis, not her mini-Budget.
Ms Truss was asked during the event about criticism from her predecessor Theresa May, who said she had destroyed the Tories’ reputation for economic competence. She lashed out at Baroness May’s 2017 election campaign, which was derailed by social care plans that became known as the “dementia tax”.
“I don’t know what to say about the 2017 election and our policies on social care,” she said.
She went on to say she would not “get into a slanging match” with her predecessor, but railed against successive Tory PMs who have gone along with “the economic orthodoxy”.
Asked about the ongoing contest to succeed Mr Sunak, Ms Truss said the four candidates had not acknowledged the state of the country or of the party itself, and that she would not endorse any of them.
“So far, I haven’t seen any of the candidates really acknowledge how bad things are in the country as a whole, and frankly, for the Conservative Party.”
The former prime minister said there is a “Panglossian” view among them that the party needs to unite. They think “all we need to do is show competence, and we will be ushered back into office”, she said, adding: “They have to explain what went wrong, why things are so bad for the Conservatives, and what they’re actually going to do.”
In an otherwise downbeat session, Ms Truss drew rapturous applause when she repeated her endorsement of former president Trump in the race for the White House.
Asked whether she had anything that could cheer the audience, Ms Truss blurted out that “Donald Trump might win”.
She said: “Trump winning in America will be a sign of the tide turning, because at present we have Keir Starmer in London, we’ve got socialists in Australia, Canada, America, France, Germany... We need to start turning the tide the other way, and this will be the first domino.
“Trump is anti-establishment: the Davos World Economic Forum elite do not like Donald Trump, and I take that as a good sign.” In 2018, Trump became the first sitting president since Bill Clinton in 2000 to attend the gathering in Davos.
Throughout the event, Ms Truss repeatedly claimed that she was not to blame for the chaos in financial markets in the wake of her tax-cutting mini-Budget.
Instead, she lashed out at Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, highlighting that he is “paid more than the prime minister” and claiming that the crisis was his fault.
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