I’m the insurgent candidate, says Truss as she vows to reshape how the Bank tackles inflation
Straight-shooting minister defends her fiscal plans and shows why standing for leader is a family affair
U‘I want to do things differently and be bold so that we become a high-growth, highproductivity powerhouse’
‘The best way to get welfare spending down is to help people get into work. That is my priority’
nlike Rishi Sunak, the moment Liz Truss found out she had made the final two in the race to be the next prime minister was not captured on camera and released. But, by the sound of it, the celebrations were no less restrained than her rival’s fist pump and cheer.
“I yelped with delight,” recounts the Foreign Secretary, looking back to 4pm on Wednesday. “There was lots of hugging and back-slapping.” Someone opened the chilled white wine. A celebratory photograph of the team was taken. Then more cheer on the House of Commons terrace.
By Ms Truss’s side were her daughters: Frances, 16, and Liberty, 13.
Both children have been joining their mother in campaign headquarters to help make her the country’s most powerful politician – some summer holiday project.
“My elder daughter’s working on the digital team,” Ms Truss says. “She’s done a computing GCSE so she’s helping out on that. And my younger daughter was there as well, giving general political advice.”
The family – Frances, Liberty and Ms Truss’s husband Hugh, 48 – had been planning to go to Disney World Florida this summer. Three times the trip had been postponed because of the pandemic. The others are still going, but Ms Truss will have to wait a while longer.
Meeting The Daily Telegraph for her first interview since reaching the second phase of the leadership contest, Ms Truss, 46, still seems on a high from making the final two. Both she and Mr Sunak now face a summer of campaigning before Tory members decide who will be the next leader.
Already Wednesday’s result is fading, but it is worth remembering just how much of a close-run thing it was. Penny Mordaunt, the trade minister, had been in second place for all of the opening four ballots, positioned to join Mr Sunak above the ultimate cut-off point.
Ms Truss only took second place on the final ballot by getting eight votes more than Ms Mordaunt, out of an electorate of 358 Tory MPS. Put another way – if five MPS had switched from the Foreign Secretary to Ms Mordaunt, she would have been knocked out.
But they did not, and it is a beaming Ms Truss who greets The Telegraph on the first floor of her homely campaign headquarters in a residential street near Parliament. The exhaustion that the roller-coaster last fortnight must have brought is not evident. “Adrenaline,” Ms Truss explains.
The building is just a stone’s throw away from the headquarters of the man who stands between her and No10. Ms Truss is planning to brief the press like Mr Sunak did a few days earlier, but will not be handing out branded sun cream (“guaranteed protection against Labour”) like her rival’s camp. “Only blood, sweat and tears on my campaign,” she jokes.
For the first half of this race, Ms Truss has been the underdog. It was Mr Sunak, the former chancellor, who was first in every vote. But those roles have now reversed, according to the bookmakers – and Mr Sunak himself.
It is a framing that Ms Truss disputes. “I see myself as an insurgent because I want to change things,” she says. It is an eye-catching choice of words. So, is Mr Sunak the establishment candidate?
“I’m not commenting on the other candidate in the race. I’m putting forward a positive agenda. But we do need things to change,” she says.
“We have had low growth for two decades. We now face a massive global economic shock after Covid and with the war in Ukraine. And this is a pivotal moment for our country. Do we continue with business as usual? Or do we do things differently, be bold? I want to do things differently and be bold so that we become a high-growth, high-productivity powerhouse.”
The stance is in some ways curious. Ms Truss has been MP for 12 years – representing South West Norfolk – compared with Mr Sunak’s seven years. She was in the Cabinet before her rival even entered Parliament, and has held five Cabinet briefs compared with his two. Yet it is Mr Sunak who is being framed as the “business as usual” candidate. In a race defined so far by economic policy differences, Mr Sunak is promising to continue the tax-and-spend trajectory that he set while in Government.
Ms Truss has pledged more than £30billion in tax cuts, all paid for with more borrowing – yet denies it would fuel inflation. She has also widened her attack on the status quo, railing against Whitehall’s approach in the last 20 years.
Is it all too good to be believed? Mr Sunak has argued so, saying it is a “fairy tale” that you can slash taxes and somehow control inflation.
So, does Ms Truss actually have a plan to bring down inflation? “Inflation is forecast to come down next year,” she says. But the forecasts keep being wrong? “Well, some forecasts are wrong,” she fires back – which sounds like a dig at the Bank of England, though the target is not named.
She goes on: “I believe it is right that inflation will come down because inflation was caused by a global supply shock. But it was exacerbated by monetary policy. What I have said is, in the future I’m going to look at the Bank of England’s mandate. It is set by the Treasury. It was last set by Gordon Brown in 1997.”
It is a line Ms Truss has said before. So what, actually, would she change about the mandate? “What I want to do is look at best practice from central banks around the world, look at their mandates, and make sure we have a tight enough focus on the money supply and on inflation.”
So change the mandate for the independent Bank of England to do less quantitative easing (i.e. printing money)? “I’m not going to say,” she continues. “I want to conduct a review of that mandate. But I will look at, and the chancellor will look at, what the best practice mandate looks like.”
Ms Truss’s position on tax cuts and their relative merits has been well aired this week. Less so her stance on spending. She told reporters in a press briefing on Thursday that she was not considering spending cuts.
But that means public spending would keep rising to its highest level in 50 years, a part of Mr Sunak’s legacy that Truss backers such as Brexit minister Jacob Rees-mogg have used to dub him a “socialist chancellor”?
Pushed for more details, Ms Truss says she would hold a spending review alongside an emergency budget if she wins. She suggests welfare spending is one area in which savings could be found. “The best way to get welfare spending down is to help people get into work. That is my priority,” she says.
“We do have people who are not currently in work. We’ve also got a huge number of vacancies and a huge demand for staff. So we need to get the skills right, get the training right, help people into work, encourage people into work, give them the support they need to get into work. That’s the way we get the welfare budget down. But those things take time.”
One Boris Johnson spending promise she is keeping is the £36billion extra he put into the NHS and social care, even though she will reverse the instrument for raising the money – the 1.25p increase in National Insurance that kicked in this April.
It remains unclear when the money, initially given to the NHS, will move across to help fund the new social care approach of capping lifetime costs.
Many commentators and Tory MPS expect removing the money from the NHS, as planned, will never happen.
But Ms Truss is resolute that the money should switch over. “I want it to go into social care. I think that is very, very important,” she says. “And in fact, by putting it into social care, we help relieve the pressure on the NHS. Because what we have is people who are currently, regrettably, stuck in hospital because there aren’t the social care places available. So it’s very important that we put it into social care.”
Whether she would also stump up the money to keep the NHS budget at its current level when that happens is unclear.
Another area where Ms Truss is framing herself as more radical than Mr Sunak is building on Brexit. Her status as a Remainer is seen as an Achilles’ heel by her political opponents.
But will that prove as politically disadvantageous as some hope? She points to securing trade deals and pushing the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill through the Commons to back up her argument about “delivery”, and she has some prominent Brexiteers on her side.
Today, Ms Truss announces that all EU legislation transposed on to the UK statute books will be given a “sunset” clause for the end of next year, meaning a decision will be taken on whether to keep, amend or scrap around 2,400 laws by then. Mr Sunak has made a similar promise. Could the audit really be done in less than a year and a half? “I’m a great believer in deadlines, because that’s what motivates people to get things done,” she says. “It’s already been six years since people voted to leave the European Union. We’ve still got these laws on our statute books and they’re holding us back.”
There are similarities between the candidates in another policy area, too, if Ms Truss is to be believed.
Mr Sunak this week claimed credit for stopping a national lockdown during the surge of the omicron variant of Covid-19 last Christmas. It was hours away from being announced at a press conference, the former chancellor claimed.
So, did she privately urge against lockdowns during the pandemic?
“I’ve been pretty much against the lockdowns and wanting them to be as short as possible,” Ms Truss says. “I think it was a mistake for us to close schools. I think it’s had a huge impact on children.”
But some have suggested she was on the more supportive end of the Cabinet debate? “I never spoke out in favour of a lockdown,” she says, referring to private Cabinet meetings – though clarifies to make clear she backed the early restrictions when Covid struck.
Ms Truss says she was “very concerned” about the proposed lockdown during the omicron wave, but will not be drawn on whether she opposed the one in late 2020.
“I will have to review my records to see. But, in general, I have been pro ending lockdowns as early as possible and I have been pro opening up more countries on the green list,” she says.
Away from policy, the reality of standing for leadership is beginning to set in. In modern politics, communication can shape success as much as substance, and critics have accused Ms Truss of scoring poorly on that test. To boil down one common criticism, her public delivery is judged by some politicos to be too wooden.
“I’m not the slickest presenter. I completely admit that,” she says.
“But I am somebody where what you see is what you get. I’m a straighttalking Yorkshirewoman. I don’t take no for an answer and people understand that about me. I absolutely believe that, with the vision that I’ve set out, with the delivery I’ve shown, that I can win the next election, I can beat Keir Starmer [the Labour leader].”
There is time for a few quick denials. Ms Truss does not bite when asked if she will appoint Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister now backing her campaign, as chancellor. “I’m not speculating about any Cabinet jobs,” she replies. So you have not promised anyone Cabinet jobs? “No I haven’t.”
Really? “No” – a double categorical denial.
Similarly, Ms Truss suggests the current Prime Minister is not cheering her on, despite his apparent cold fury at Mr Sunak’s resignation, which triggered the ministerial stampede that brought him down. She has not talked to Mr Johnson since she made the final two. “He is not backing any candidate,” she adds.
For the Truss family, this will be a strange summer. Ms Truss has been around politics for more than a decade but has only headed up a great office of state for less than a year. Even in the last fortnight, there has been an apparent jump in her public profile, with more hollers of recognition on the street and requests for selfies.
Does the family know what is coming? “I think there’s a dawning realisation that this is real,” Ms Truss says. “I think my daughter’s friends at school are quite amazed by what’s happening. Hugh is very, very supportive of what I do in politics. In fact, we met at the 1997 Conservative Party conference. He’s a true blue. But I think it’s all happened quite suddenly.”
The family would move into Downing Street if she wins, she says. Her husband Hugh is an accountant and, according to Ms Truss, will not seek the limelight. “He doesn’t want to have a sort of massive public role, I think it’s fair to say,” she says. “He goes out campaigning for the Conservative Party. He’s very active as a local Conservative member. But he’s a very stoical person.”
For her daughters, the world of politics feels a natural fit. As the interview wraps up, Ms Truss introduces The Telegraph to Frances and Liberty. The teenagers rush across from a corner of the campaign headquarters to greet their mother.
“I’m doing an audit of all your past departments,” Frances declares. So, which role was her favourite? The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, she says, because of the tea ladies.
“They gave us orange juice and lots of Kit Kats.”
The girls have made one other request of their mother, that they can hold sleepovers if they do make it to No10. But Ms Truss’s message to her daughters is the same to her campaign staff and the bookies’ predicting she will be the next prime minister: “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”