Can anything stop Liz Truss?

Liz Truss cemented her position as the favourite in the Tory leadership race this week, winning the endorsement of a series of high-profile MPs and ministers.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, and former leadership rivals Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat were among those to endorse Truss, who was also boosted by a new YouGov poll suggesting she has a 34-point lead over her rival, Rishi Sunak. Some 60% of Tory members said they’d vote for her to be the next prime minister.

Sunak sought to regain momentum by pledging to cut VAT on energy bills and slash income tax in the next parliament. The plans were a departure from his earlier pledges to resist tax cuts until public finances were healthier.

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Sunak’s campaign was helped when Truss was forced into a U-turn over plans for a “war on Whitehall waste”. The foreign secretary had proposed cutting civil service pay outside London, which she claimed would save taxpayers £8.8bn a year. But the policy was criticised by Tory MPs when it emerged that it could lead to pay cuts for millions of teachers, nurses and public sector workers in some of the poorest parts of the country.

What the papers said

There’s no doubting that the momentum in this race is with Truss, said the Daily Mail. Her “boosterish” agenda resonates with Tory MPs and members. So too does her status as “an authentic standard-bearer for low-tax, small-state Conservatism”, and her pledge to lift the ban on new grammar schools. She’s also benefiting from having stayed loyal to Boris Johnson. Truss made a “faltering start” to this contest, said The Daily Telegraph. But she has undoubtedly grown in stature during its course. “In our view, she is ready to assume the highest political office in the land.”

Not on the evidence of this week’s U-turn she isn’t, said The Times. Threatening to cut the pay of public sector workers outside London during a cost-of-living crisis was clearly foolish. It’s already hard enough to recruit doctors and teachers in the least wealthy areas of Britain.

Besides, “levelling down the pay of police and nurses” seems a strange way to “level up” regions like the Midlands and the North. The episode should give Conservative members “pause for thought” before they cast their votes. This was clearly “a bad stumble” by Truss, agreed The Independent. Now, we’ll have to see if Sunak can seize the opportunity to “get back into a contest that seemed to be slipping away from him”.

Truss’s public sector pay U-turn was the most high-profile blunder of the race so far, said John Rentoul on The Independent. But it was by no means the first “wrong-headed” policy floated by the candidates. Sunak wants to fine patients £10 if they miss NHS appointments (unworkable); Truss thinks Oxford and Cambridge should have to interview every student in the country with three A* grades at A level (fraught with problems). And those are just two examples.

This race reflects a party which, increasingly, “dislikes hard choices”, said Robert Shrimsley in the FT. Tories want “investment in public services and help with energy bills but lower taxation; sound money but also higher borrowing, deregulation with interventionism; Brexit and higher growth; housebuilding but just not where they live”. It’s a re-hash of Johnson’s “cakeism” doctrine – and Truss is the frontrunner because she’s “prepared to go full gateau if it gets her to the top”.

Actually, said Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph, Truss has merely recognised a revolutionary streak within Tory members. They’re fed up with “failed orthodoxies”, and want Britain to take a more conservative turn. Like Thatcher, Truss sees herself “as an outsider who is bolder and more ambitious” than the risk-averse “establishment men whom she finds so condescending”, said David Gauke in The New Statesman. She took on the education “blob” as a junior minister, dismissed fears over a no-deal Brexit, and has criticised Treasury orthodoxy and the Bank of England. Now, her “anti-establishment” credentials are endearing her to Tory members.

Truss could yet be undone by some kind of “implosion”, said Iain Martin in The Times. There are four weeks of the campaign left, and Tory members may hold off casting their ballots until they see how the race develops. “As it stands, though, Truss has outwitted her opponents and is heading for No. 10.” Her problem, said Sebastian Payne in the FT, will be staying there. With Britain beset by problems, the risk for the Tories is that the next election is a “1979 moment”, when voters look at who has been in charge and aren’t much impressed with the results. “Truss and Sunak may offer a fresh face, but they cannot run away from their party’s record.”

What next?

Voting in the leadership race has been delayed because of a GCHQ warning that cyber-hackers could change people’s votes, The Daily Telegraph reports. In light of this, the party has abandoned its plan to allow members to change their vote electronically later in the race. The unforeseen alteration caused a short delay in the sending out of ballots. They had been due to be sent to the party’s 160,000 or so members this week.

Truss was accused of under-mining the Union by claiming at a Tory hustings that Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is an “attention-seeker” who ought to be ignored. The remarks were cheered by Tory members, but later drew criticism from across the political spectrum.