Sunak decision to ‘trash my reputation’ added to Tory election defeat – Truss

Liz Truss has claimed Rishi Sunak’s decision to “trash my reputation” contributed to the scale of the Conservatives’ defeat at the General Election.

The former prime minister also said her successor, Mr Sunak, had abandoned “conservative principles” during his premiership.

In her first public intervention since the results of the General Election, Ms Truss insisted she had attempted to take on the status quo – which she described as “Blairite economic orthodoxy” – with her short-lived, tax-cutting agenda.

The former MP for South West Norfolk was among some 251 Tories who lost their seats at the election, as Labour swept to victory in a landslide.

Her Labour rival in the Norfolk constituency, Terry Jermy, won by 630 votes over Ms Truss.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph newspaper, Ms Truss claimed she had “refrained from responding” during the campaign to “prevent further damage to the party”.

She added: “However, I feel that I must speak out now.”

“More than 250 of us paid the electoral price for this. Regrettably, over the course of the next five years, it will be the British people who have to bear the cost of this failing.”

Ms Truss claimed that the gambling scandal which engulfed the Tories mid-campaign had contributed to a lack of enthusiasm on the doorstep, as had Mr Sunak “repeating the mantra of stop the boats while presiding over record immigration”.

She also said her Conservative predecessors as prime minister did not do enough to push back against a “Leftist agenda”, including on issues like net zero and gender self-identification.

She was the only one, she claimed, who sought to act differently.

“During my brief period as prime minister, I tried to take on the Blairite economic orthodoxy and was the only recent PM to reduce the tax burden by reversing Rishi Sunak’s Health and Social Care Levy,” she said.

In contrast, she said Mr Sunak had “sought a short-term advantage in the Conservative leadership contest by claiming that cutting taxes did not generate growth” when the two had faced off against one other to be Tory leader in 2022.

She added: “This abandonment of conservative principles not only led to him getting no credit from the voters for cutting national insurance, but also led to an even larger general election defeat as he continued to trash my record and promote Labour’s false narrative that the global rise in mortgage rates was somehow my fault.”

The former prime minister rounded off her assessment of the current political landscape by suggesting the public will not stick with Labour after five years in Government, as the party has “no agenda to reduce taxes or deregulate or dismantle the bloated Whitehall bureaucracy”.

She added: “I am in no doubt that after five years of Labour, the public will be crying out for a popular Conservative alternative.”