Johnson rival Liz Truss should be more careful with taxpayers’ money

The story that the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, flew by official private jet to Australia at a cost of at least half a million pounds to the Exchequer, rather than via scheduled business class flights, is embarrassing on a number of grounds – and indicative of a certain sense of entitlement that extends further than the Cabinet Office and No 10.

The timing, for example, is hardly ideal, given that a shadowy campaign group, rallying under the slogan “In Liz We Truss”, is trying to sell the foreign secretary as some kind of reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher.

Mrs Thatcher certainly had her regal, imperious, entitled side, particularly towards the end of her time as premier and party leader, but the grocer’s daughter’s devotion to “housewife economics” and financial probity was legendary. Ms Truss does seem rather profligate by comparison, at a time when the national debt and borrowing stands at record levels, and her principal rival, Rishi Sunak is trying to put public finances on a sustainable footing.

Back in 2009, during the financial crisis, Ms Truss wrote a pamphlet for the Reform think tank advocating, among other things, fees to visit a GP, ending pensioners’ “gimmicks” such as the winter fuel allowance, and scrapping aircraft carriers and the Typhoon jet. Such radical ideas, albeit antique, may not commend her to colleagues in more marginal constituencies.

Her text also expressed this Thatcheresque sentiment: “Every public sector worker … should spend taxpayers’ money with at least the care they would give to their own. This change of mindset would be reflected in everyday changes such as travelling by economy rather than business class.”

The obvious charge of hypocrisy bites particularly hard at a time when the government is being constantly accused of “one rule for us, another rule rule for them” in the wake of the Partygate scandal. The foreign secretary, as it happens, is the minister who approves the use of private transport on such a scale. Again, that is, according to her critics, a manifestation of entitlement, and abuse of the system.

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In her defence, it is fair to say that the cost is obviously a tiny part of public spending, and would more than pay for itself through better economic and defence relations with Australia. It is also difficult to conduct sensitive discussions about national security onboard a commercial flight. Perhaps it would have been possible, though, to create some sort of safe space for the foreign secretary.

Though this may not be top of Ms Truss’s priorities, still less those of her fellow MPs, her flight was enormously polluting, even by aviation standards – approaching 500 tonnes of CO2. That, at the least, does not suggest that Ms Truss is even as interested as Boris Johnson in net zero and making the weak Cop26 agreement stick.

There will be much more of this in the coming days and weeks. Whether the prime minister survives his current troubles, such is the political culture he has inculcated, and such are the well-known flaws in his personality, that other scandals and crises will emerge before long. Sooner or later his party will find him an impossible burden and realise that he is incorrigible. In the meantime, his rivals will be under unusually close scrutiny. They cannot afford to waste taxpayers’ money.