Liz Truss’s U-turn suggests that Rishi Sunak could yet win the argument

For someone who has so consciously copied Margaret Thatcher, Liz Truss must have found her U-turn acutely embarrassing. “You turn if you want to. The lady’s for turning too,” as the former prime minister never said.

That is no excuse, however, for the bad grace with which this most familiar of political manoeuvres was carried out. Her campaign issued a statement saying: “Over the last few hours there has been a wilful misrepresentation of our campaign.” It was unwise to accuse journalists, even indirectly, of “wilful misrepresentation” when they were accurately reporting a policy announced by Ms Truss herself.

The policy published on Monday night said: “Truss’s government will save up to £8.8bn a year by replacing national pay boards with regional pay boards.” It was not “misrepresenting” this plan to suggest that it meant lower pay than would otherwise be the case for public sector workers outside London and the South East, as the next sentence in the policy announcement said: “This will make it easier to adjust officials’ pay.”

Ms Truss’s policy programme generally gives the impression of having been insufficiently thought through. She almost makes a virtue of her promises of tax cuts that appear to pluck figures from the air, and she is getting away with it because everyone feels overtaxed, without really knowing the difference between national insurance rises that have been part-rescinded and corporation tax rises that are yet to come.

But this is the first time Ms Truss has come visibly unstuck. The policy was a bad one, culled from some old think tank ideas, probably under pressure from Rishi Sunak, who had pointed out that the money for tax cuts has to come from somewhere. He said, rightly, that tax cuts imply either higher borrowing or cuts in public spending. Ms Truss presumably thought that if she could put out a news release promising to save a large sum of money from “Whitehall waste, bureaucracy and inefficiency”, she could claim to cut public spending without evoking the spectre of “austerity”.

No such luck. In a textbook demonstration of Mr Sunak’s argument, Ms Truss has been reminded that cutting public spending means public sector workers losing out – and they cannot all be “diversity and inclusion” officers, whose salaries might account for 0.1 per cent of the total advertised in Ms Truss’s policy statement.

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Hence the abandonment of the policy after just 13 hours: “There will be no proposal taken forward on regional pay boards for civil servants or public sector workers.”

This is a significant moment in the campaign, and an important reinforcement of the argument for putting the candidates through their paces over several weeks. If Theresa May had been tested in this way, her weakness as a campaigner might not have come as a surprise in the middle of a general election.

It is not as if Mr Sunak’s campaign has been perfect. His proposal for £10 fines for missing NHS appointments was foolish, unworkable, and a distraction from serious policies for dealing with the pandemic backlog – to which Mr Sunak, to his credit, has given serious thought.

But this is a bad stumble by Ms Truss, casting doubt on her instincts, and it gives Mr Sunak a chance to get back into a contest that seemed to be slipping away from him. The Techne poll of Conservative Party members is also significant, in suggesting that Ms Truss’s lead may not be unassailable. A more even contest can only be a good thing for the country, as it will force both candidates to raise their game.