Fury of Team Truss as former MP launches ‘poisonous’ attack
ALLIES of Liz Truss hit back last night over friendly-fire jibes at the leadership candidate yesterday.
They voiced anger that Tory heavyweight Michael Gove dismissed her campaign as a ‘holiday from reality’. The ex-Cabinet Minister, who endorsed Rishi Sunak and signalled he is ending his career in frontline politics, also said Truss’s tax cuts would put ‘the stock options of FTSE 100 executives’ before the poorest in society.
His comments coincided with a bitter attack on Ms Truss from former Tory MP Matthew Parris in his column in The Times.
Her backers branded the 73-yearold ‘poisonous’ for describing the Foreign Secretary as ‘crackers’ and forecasting that it would all ‘come crashing down’ if she becomes PM. One said Mr Parris was still ‘bitter’ about Brexit, while Jacob ReesMogg said: ‘Matthew Parris is the John Lewis of polemicists – never knowingly understated.’
Mr Parris, MP for West Derbyshire from 1979 to 1986, wrote: ‘Liz Truss is a planet-sized mass of overconfidence and ambition teetering upon a pinhead of a political brain.’
He also repeated his own earlier assessments, which included that she was ‘intellectually shallow, her convictions wafer-thin’, ‘driven by ambition pure and simple’ and ‘that her leadership of the Conservative Party and our country would be a tragedy for both’.
He added ‘her manner was wooden and her ability to communicate convincingly to an electorate wider than the narrow band of Tory activists was virtually non-existent; that she was dangerously impulsive and headstrong, with a self-belief unattended by precaution.’
Last night, senior Tories said that in 2014, at the time of a by-election in Clacton-on-Sea, Mr Parris said the Tories should ‘let go’ of places such as the Essex town. He sneered: ‘Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-andtrainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.’
The writer and Remainer, who is no longer a Tory member, added the party must give up on people who spend their days ‘buying scratchcards’ and inhabit a land of ‘Ken Dodd, meat pies, smoking in pubs and the Bee Gees’.
Disdaining Brexit-leaning voters, he spoke of concerns about immigration, saying: ‘Like Biebermania [a reference to pop star Justin Bieber], the fuss over immigration should fade over time.’
In 2016 the people of Claction rejected his views and voted 70 per cent to leave the EU.
‘She is shallow and her convictions are wafer-thin’