Inside Politics: Spin

Hello there,

I’m Matt Mathers and welcome to The Independent’s Inside Politics newsletter.

The Tour de France may have finished but there is plenty of action to come this week for fans of spin as the Tory leadership race enters its final stages. Elsewhere, a damning cross-party report by MPs warns the NHS is facing the biggest staffing crisis in its history.

Parliament is not sitting.

The race to replace Boris Johnson as Tory leader and, therefore, our next prime minister looks set to get ugly this week as Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss face off in the final two TV debates of the contest.

Over the weekend, the former chancellor and foreign secretary set out their stalls on taxation and the economy and puffed out their chests yesterday by talking tough on immigration – a key issue for the Conservative membership, which will choose the eventual winner.

The rival camps have now turned to mudslinging on foreign policy and security, with claims and counterclaims on China. Last night Sunak labelled Beijing as the UK’s biggest long-term threat. And in a briefing to The Daily Telegraph, his team takes aim at Truss’s tenure as an education minister, saying she failed to recognise China’s growing influence in UK universities. Team Truss hits back in the Daily Mail, accusing Sunak of being “soft” on the Communist Party-ruled country by trying to forge closer trade ties with it.

It is a slightly peculiar direction for the debate to turn in given that both Sunak and Truss have served in a government that has not exactly taken the toughest stance on China. As the two candidates try to put distance between themselves and the outgoing Johnson – and with ballots set to go out next week – it is Sunak who appears to have it all to do, according to most of the polling.

Truss, as things stand, is the clear favourite among the Tory faithful. But the foreign secretary has so far failed to inspire confidence with her public appearances and the Tory membership must weigh up if she is capable of winning the next general election. A lot could change this week as Sunak gets two more outings in front of the cameras.

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Whoever wins the leadership contest will be tasked with getting to grips with an increasingly overstretched NHS – a policy area where Labour will likely be able to make hay on when voters head to the polls at the next general election.

And the task for the next PM is not getting any easier as a damning new report by a cross-party group of MPs warns that the health service in England is facing the greatest workforce crisis in its history.

The report, by the Commons health and social care committee, also warns that persistent understaffing in the NHS is creating a serious risk to patient safety and that the government has no credible strategy to improve the situation.

Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting accused the government of having “utterly failed” to address the crisis.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We are growing the health and social care workforce, with over 4,000 more doctors, and 9,600 more nurses compared to last year, and over 1,400 more doctors in general practice compared to March 2019.

“As we continue to deliver on our commitment to recruit 50,000 more nurses by 2024, we are also running a £95 million recruitment drive for maternity services and providing £500 million to develop our valued social care workforce, including through training opportunities and new career pathways.

“We have commissioned NHS England to develop a long term workforce plan to recruit and support NHS staff while they deliver high quality, safe care to patients and help to bust the Covid backlogs.”

“It is the government’s position that the migration and economic development partnership is fully compatible with all of our domestic and international legal obligations, including ECHR rights.”

Edward Timpson, solicitor general, insists the government’s Rwanda policy is compatible with UK’s international obligations.

“Liz Truss allies say that Rishi Sunak’s plans to house migrants on cruise ships rather than in hotels would breach international law. They say that it will ultimately end up creating prison ships in areas that are in need of tourism and investment.”

Times politics editor Steven Swinford on Tory leadership race.

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