I may have gone over the top about Rishi’s clothes. But I don’t want my party to be fooled by appearances the way many of the Cabinet were

From a Boris loyalist, an impassioned personal view

ATWEET I posted last week highlighted Liz Truss’s choice of £4.50 earrings and Rishi Sunak’s decision to wear £450 Prada shoes to visit a Teesside building site, while also donning a £3,500 suit for a leadership debate. It caused a bit of a storm, to say the least, quickly clocking up over ten million views. My comments were widely interpreted to be anti-aspirational and it was suggested that I was seeking revenge against the man who, while Chancellor, had been planning a coup for a very long time and who had ruthlessly and metaphorically stabbed Boris Johnson in the back.

Rishi had been plotting against the most electorally successful Prime Minister the Conservative Party has known since the days of Margaret Thatcher. His actions made Michael Gove’s betrayal of Boris Johnson during the 2016 leadership campaign appear like a rank amateur rehearsing for the role of Brutus in a village hall play.

Those interpretations of my tweet were wrong. For I know only too well the value of aspiration in life. I would never wish to suppress anyone’s desire to improve their lot. In fact, my entire time as a Secretary of State in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has been focused on encouraging such values.

We have transferred funding from London to socially deprived regions in an attempt to reach

He made Gove look like a village hall amateur rehearsing for the role of Brutus

out to those from backgrounds who have never considered a career in the creative or sporting sectors. In doing so, we have lived and breathed the policy of levelling up.

No, my Twitter comment ran much deeper. I wanted to highlight Rishi’s misguided sartorial style in order to alert Tory members not to be taken in by appearances in the way that happened to many of us who served with the Chancellor in Cabinet. The assassin’s gleaming smile, his gentle voice and even his diminutive stature had many of us well and truly fooled.

I wish to stress it’s not the case that I believe a rich man or woman – even if their father-in-law is one of the richest men on an entire continent – cannot be Prime Minister of this great country. But they do have to possess good judgment, understand the lives of others, have empathy, compassion and know how to fill a car with petrol and pay for it at a till.

Rishi’s father was a GP, his mother a pharmacist. He attended a public school where the annual fees are about £36,000. They were in the top two per cent income bracket of all earners in the UK. To describe his background as humble is yet another indication of poor judgment.

Rishi will never know what it is like to feel scared, broke and hopeless, without a safety net provided by wealthy parents. He has never had to lie awake at night, worrying about how to pay the bills. A bailiff will never knock on his door.

The fact is, I was criticising Rishi’s complete lack of self-awareness for wearing such expensive clothes on a visit to one of the most socially deprived towns in the North of England.

That said, there is a part of me that feels sorry for Rishi.

He has been enthusiastically supported – and I must add, very likely completely taken in – by Dominic Cummings and a special adviser (who, incidentally, co-founded an agency that organised sex parties) who used to cut a shadowy figure stalking the corridors of Downing

Street. Rishi travelled along a path of treachery, and in doing so is unlikely to win the hearts and minds of Conservative Party members because, above all else, they value loyalty and decency.

The coup which removed Boris Johnson was long-planned, Tudoresque in its degree of brutality and worthy of a chapter in a Hilary Mantel novel.

It was always the case that the Prime Minister’s enemies would try to remove him before the summer parliamentary recess. The plan was to have a leadership election over the long break and showcase a new leader at the annual conference in October.

If it hadn’t been triggered by the debacle over Chris Pincher – who resigned as deputy chief whip after being accused of groping two men in a private members’ club – Boris’s enemies would have created another reason. In their desire to replace Boris, they were always going to override the choice of members, the democratic vote of the electors, an 80-seat majority and jeopardise our stability.

My own suspicions about what lay behind Rishi’s painted smile were first raised some time ago when I had to appeal to him as Chancellor regarding the review of the BBC licence fee. This was a policy I have championed during my time as Secretary of State. It was a policy enthusiastically supported by the Prime Minister and the vast majority of Conservative MPs.

However, Rishi and the Treasury refused to sign off the review and blocked it for many months. It meant we would be stuck with the ever-increasing and outdated BBC licence fee for ever.

I appealed to Rishi but he refused to budge. I spoke to him again just after Cabinet on the morning of the day he launched his coup. He flashed me that smile and said something which amounted to nothing. I was obliged to write to the Prime Minister asking him to intervene – unaware there was no time left as Boris would be forced to step down.

Imagine my utter amazement when one of Rishi’s first policy announcements as a leadership candidate was a review of the BBC licence fee! A policy he had previously been unwilling to engage with. Similarly, Rishi says he wants to cut VAT on energy bills. However, Boris had been pleading with him to introduce this measure for two years as the PM had been convinced that such a cut could provide immediate relief to families.

In a speech on Thursday, Boris commented with a hint of uncustomary sarcasm: ‘Turns out it was easier than we thought!’

Rishi was the classic dog in the manger as Chancellor. Whenever Boris sought him out to discuss serious issues, Rishi was always polite but unforthcoming. Never a team player.

OK, I may have gone slightly over the top by comparing Liz Truss’s £4.50 earrings to Rishi’s £3,500 suit. But I had been genuinely amazed when, a few months ago, Liz told me she had bought them from Claire’s and how much they cost. Liz knows how to budget. She also knows that for Britain’s economy to work well, people need money to spend, which, in turn, increases tax receipts to the Treasury.

The truth is that you can’t put money into people’s pockets if you keep taxes at the highest rates they have been for 70 years – as Rishi proposed to do. Inflation may be a global problem but the way to tackle it isn’t to increase corporation tax on businesses which are run by the people who innovate and invest and who create wealth and jobs.

No, it wasn’t my comment which attacked aspiration. Anti-aspiration runs through the policies of a man who lacks economic creativity and wants to keep taxes high.

Conservative Party members are pragmatic people. They stand as a bulwark between careerist self-interest, unadulterated spin and common sense.

This weekend they will receive ballot papers which they’ll use to choose a new leader. The only candidate who can even begin to pick up the baton from Boris, who embodies empathy, kindness, integrity and loyalty – values that are essential in someone wanting to lead a great nation – is Liz Truss.

I trust in our party members, and we should all trust their answer, because they never get it wrong.

The coup was Tudoresque in its brutality, like something by Hilary Mantel