Liz Truss is a Boris Johnson tribute act – all bluster and deflection

The Conservative hustings last night were in Darlington, a mile away from Charles Dodgson’s childhood home, Croft-on-Tees. So we went through the looking-glass where the Remainer becomes the Brexiteer and vice versa. And Liz Truss, who launched her leadership campaign as the change candidate, portrayed herself as the true preserver of the legacy of Boris Johnson.

She refused to accept that Johnson was responsible for his own downfall, agreeing with the shouts from the audience of party members that it was the fault of the media.

She defended Johnson’s record on getting Brexit done, rolling out the vaccines and standing up to Putin. But she also flattered Johnson by imitation, deflecting awkward questions by blustering and deliberate provocation. She is brilliant at the Dominic Cummings device of saying things that outrage non-Tories, but which generate adulation among a large part of the Tory membership.

Thus she said that if there were a vote in the House of Commons, she would vote to stop the committee of privileges inquiry into whether the prime minister misled parliament – although she said “there isn’t a vote and it’s going ahead”. It went down well in the hall with the large part of the audience that regarded Johnson’s fall as a conspiracy between Rishi Sunak, the “backstabber”, and the left-wing media.

The more fuss there is outside the hall about her wish to scrap the inquiry, the more the believers in the myth of Johnson betrayed will rally to her cause.

Truss is doing something similar with the debate about what kind of further help with people’s energy bills will be needed this winter. She never directly answers the question, saying two unrelated things when it is asked: one, that she will do more to help if necessary; and two, that she prefers tax cuts to “handouts”.

Like the £350m on the side of the bus, this drives reasonable people, including Sunak, to distraction, as they protest that tax cuts are no use to the hardest hit, who don’t pay taxes. But what Truss supporters among Tory members hear is that she is in favour of tax cuts and against handouts. Which is what they want to hear. The more Sunak protests, and the more that journalists ask the question, the more they get to hear it.

Last night, Truss repeated the manoeuvre, throwing in an extra bit of media bashing for good measure. She accused Tom Newton Dunn, the Talk TV presenter who was chairing the event, of “framing” the question “in a left-wing way”, calling cash help from the government a “giveaway” instead of “people’s money”.

She said: “The first thing we should do as Conservatives is help people have more of their own money. What I don’t support is taking money off people in tax and then giving it back to them in handouts. That to me is Gordon Brown economics.” That is mere chaff for the base. It is not a denial that, if she becomes prime minister, she will do the obvious thing and extend the help through the benefit system, including pension credit and the winter fuel payment for pensioners, that Sunak has already launched.

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Average gas and electricity bills are now expected to rise by a further £550 in October, above what was predicted at the time of Sunak’s announcement in May, and whoever becomes prime minister is likely to meet that average cost for vulnerable people. Simon Clarke, still chief secretary to the Treasury in the zombie government and a Truss supporter, all but confirmed that today, saying: “The government is working up a package of cost of living support that the next prime minister can consider when they take office.”

But Truss is trying to win votes in a leadership election, rather than trying to devise a workable policy for government. She is doing it in the most Boris Johnson way possible, while presenting herself as a fresh start.

There was one other minor but significant example of her Johnsonist tendencies. She told Newton Dunn, “No, that’s not true,” when he asked if her team was in talks with the civil service to prepare for government. Either she doesn’t know what her team is doing – I understand that talks have taken place, in person – or she denied it because she didn’t want to appear to be measuring the curtains of No 10, taking the leadership election for granted.

Whatever the explanation, it sounds rather like Johnson’s habit, copied from Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, of using a word to mean “just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”.