She's back! Barely four months after her disastrous stint as PM, Liz Truss has ... trends now
The return of Liz Truss, after barely four months in political exile, prompts MPs who are loyal to Rishi Sunak to sink their heads into their hands.
‘Her little entourage have been going around the Commons, saying that when the Tories lose the next election she would be the best person to rebuild the party,’ says one Minister, who served in Liz Truss’s Government.
‘It’s as if she’s plotting for us to lose so that she can promote herself.’
Allies of Ms Truss – who this weekend made her first major intervention since leaving No 10 by publishing a 4,000-word essay – insist that this is a deliberate distortion of her actual view.
They say that she has no intention of challenging Mr Sunak, so logically the only chance for her to reclaim the leadership would be if he is ousted as leader – most likely after an election defeat.
Allies of Ms Truss – who this weekend made her first major intervention since leaving No 10 by publishing a 4,000-word essay – insist that there have been deliberate distortions of her actual views
Although he no longer nurses his own dreams of leadership, he is suspected by many colleagues of trying to inveigle Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch into Downing Street
If her enduring ambitions seem surprising given her calamitous 49 days in office, that is to underestimate Ms Truss’s astonishing resilience and almost supernatural self-confidence.
Her view, shared by many Tory MPs, is that she deployed the right policies in the wrong way . . . If her plan for tax cuts had been introduced more adroitly, the country would be emerging from the economic doldrums more quickly than under Mr Sunak’s more sclerotic, managerial Premiership, which has imposed the highest tax burden on the British people for decades.
She concedes that by piling too many measures into her first Budget, including trying to scrap the 45p tax band, she wrecked her own plans by spooking the markets and bringing the economy to the brink of meltdown.
But she has made clear in meetings with her ideological allies around the globe that she does not trust Mr Sunak and his Chancellor to spearhead a revival.
It is Mr Sunak’s unique misfortune to be shadowed by, not one, but two former Prime Ministers nursing grievances about ‘unfinished business’.
On Friday, Boris Johnson told his successor in an interview with Nadine Dorries that cutting tax to boost the economy ‘needs to happen’, and he has also piled the pressure on Mr Sunak over his decision not to send aircraft to defend Ukraine.
