Liz Truss has blamed the Conservative Party’s brutal General Election defeat on RIshi Sunak for ‘trashing’ her reputation.
The former prime minister has gone in hard on her successor, Mr Sunak, and said he ‘abandoned’ Tory principles during his time at No. 10.
Ms Truss became the first ex-PM since 1935 to lose her seat in an election after her Labour rival Terry Jermy edged her out by 630 votes in the South West Norfolk constituency.
She has spoken out today for the first time since the ‘devastating’ result earlier this month, claiming she’d previously remained tight-lipped to ‘prevent further damage to the party’.
‘However, I feel that I must speak out now,’ she wrote in The Daily Telegraph. ‘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.’
The 48-year-old, who saw her 14-year reign as an MP come to an end, insisted she had attempted to take on the status quo – which she described as ‘Blairite economic orthodoxy’ – with her short-lived, tax-cutting agenda.
‘Sunak and his allies had sought a short-term advantage in the Conservative leadership contest by claiming that cutting taxes did not generate growth,’ she said.
‘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.’
Ms Truss claimed 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 Sunak 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 another to be Tory leader in 2022.
Rounding off her assessment of the current political landscape, Ms Truss suggested the public will not stick with Labour after five years in government because 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.’
Labour won 411 seats in the 2024 General Election, while the Conservatives suffered their worst ever election result, winning just 121 – a loss of 251 seats.
Mr Sunak quit as Tory leader following the humiliating defeat, but retained his own seat in Richmond and Northallerton in North Yorkshire.
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