Liz Truss has criticised Rishi Sunak for “destroying my record” in office and claimed Conservative candidates “paid the electoral price” for his mistakes in the Tories’ ouster.
The former prime minister, who held the post for just 49 days, argued that her successor had abandoned the party’s principles and that the British people would suffer for it over the next five years.
Last week, Ms Truss lost her South West Norfolk seat to Labour’s Terry Jermy by 630 votes in what was one of the most dramatic moments of an election night that saw Sir Keir Starmer’s party claim a landslide victory.
The former Conservative leader, who had represented the seat since 2010, became one of 251 Tory MPs to be unseated in a disastrous election for the party and the first former prime minister since Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald in 1935 to do so.
Ms Truss has now broken her silence following the “devastating” result which saw the Conservatives’ representation in the House of Commons collapse to just 121 MPs.
She told the Telegraph that Mr Sunak had claimed that cutting taxes did not fuel growth in a short-term attempt to secure votes in the 2022 Conservative leadership campaign.
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She said: “This abandonment of Conservative principles not only meant that he got no credit from voters for cutting National Insurance, but also led to an even greater general election defeat as he continued to smear my record and promote the false Labour narrative that the global rise in mortgage rates was somehow my fault.”
The former prime minister revealed she had not spoken out during the general election period for fear of disrupting the party’s campaign, but now the time had come to step in.
Ms Truss insisted she had tried to challenge the status quo – which she described as “Blairite economic orthodoxy” – with her short-lived tax-cutting programme.
She claimed the gambling scandal that engulfed the Tories mid-campaign had contributed to a lack of enthusiasm on the doorstep, as had Mr Sunak “repeating the mantra of stopping the boats while presiding over record immigration”.
The former Conservative Party leader also said her Conservative predecessors as prime minister had not done enough to combat a “left-wing agenda”, including on issues such as net zero and gender self-identification.
She was the only one, she claimed, who wanted to do things differently.
The former prime minister added that Labour would not be re-elected in five years because it had no plan to tackle Whitehall “bureaucracy” or cut taxes.
The move comes after Ms Truss led a parade of Conservative Party big names who sensationally lost their seats in the Tory election bloodbath.
Terry Jermy overturned a 26,195-vote majority won by Ms Truss in 2019 after reform and an independent campaign by the “Turnip Taliban” – a group of disaffected local former Conservatives – eroded his support.
In a humiliating night for Rishi Sunak’s party, some of the Tories’ biggest names – including a record number of senior MPs – lost their seats as Labour secured a historic landslide victory.
Jacob Rees-Mogg lost his Somerset North East & Hanham seat to Labour’s Dan Norris by more than 5,000 votes. In a polite speech, he congratulated Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer on “what appears to be a historic victory”.
Meanwhile, the seemingly glum Defence Secretary Grant Shapps had a “Portillo moment” when he was beaten by Labour in Welwyn Hatfield by around 3,000 votes.
The “Portillo” moment is a reference to Conservative minister Michael Portillo who lost what was considered a safe Conservative seat in the Labour landslide of 1997.
And Penny Mordaunt lost her seat in the House of Commons despite being tipped as a potential future Conservative leader, as the party tries to recover from a long-awaited election defeat.
