“It’s Terry Or Truss” — Labour MP Who Unseated Liz Truss Reveals How He Beat Ex-PM
Labour MP Terry Jeremy (second from left) defeated former prime minister Liz Truss in her South West Norfolk seat last month (Alamy)
4 min read
The Labour MP who overturned Liz Truss’ huge majority to oust the former prime minister on 4 July said he ran on the slogan; look, it's Liz Truss.
Terry Jermy, the MP for South West Norfolk, said a crowd-funding campaign paid for thousands of leaflets saying the race to win was “Terry or Truss”, helping him achieve the biggest swing from Conservative to Labour ever recorded in a general election.
His victory was the most surprising of a number of high-profile defeats for senior Tory figures last month, with more than a dozen Cabinet ministers losing their seats in what was the worst ever general election defeat for the Conservatives.
Penny Mordaunt, Gillian Keegan and Grant Shapps, who were senior figures in the previous Tory administration, all lost their seats as the Conservatives bled support to Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK.
The outcome in the formerly safe Tory constituency was one of the last to be announced as Keir Starmer's Labour swept to victory.
Speaking to The Rundown podcast from PoliticsHome this week, however, Jermy said he spent the hours leading up to the declaration expecting Truss to end up in third place.
“For most of the night, Truss was third. I thought the story was going to be former prime minister loses her seat and comes third, and it's total humiliation,” he told this week's episode of the podcast.
“Reform were second, and I thought it'd be between me and Reform.”
But he said as the night wore on Truss started to do much better, moving into second place, adding: “And I thought, well, maybe the rest of the night will be positive for her, and she goes up into first place, and don't get carried away with yourself.
“I thought we'd win by 700, at the end of it we won by 630 so we weren’t too far wrong.”
Despite starting the campaign as a rank outsider, Jermy said he felt the tide was shifting during the campaign after Truss failed to turn up to a hustings with the other candidates.
“She was hated everywhere we went, even lifelong Tory members, Tory councillors, people that have voted Tory all their life, were telling me: 'I will not vote for her',” he said.
Jermy said not turning up to the hustings “fed into that narrative about her being inaccessible”, after complaints that Truss was spending more time promoting her book in America than in her former Norfolk constituency.
“She's often had that sort of persona, but when she’s got the security, when she wasn't doing the hustings, she doesn't really do surgeries, that all fed into this narrative that our MP isn't on our side, she's not accessible, we can't engage with that,” he said.
Labour MP for South West Norfolk MP Terry Jermy (UK Parliament)
The 38-year-old, who has been a local councillor in the area since 2008, also criticised his predecessor for failing to help him with the transition to being the new MP.
“There's also a lot of variety in terms of handover,” Jermy told the podcast.
"I've had colleagues say they were immediately contacted by the previous Tory MP to wish them good luck, they’ve had a coffee, they’ve had a meeting, the staff have discussed things. One MP I know, the former Tory MP handed over all the office furniture, to give them the best possible start to crack on.
“I've not had any of that. I've had two press releases issued by the Liz Truss team having a go at me since the election.”
Although so far he’s mainly known in Westminster as the man who ousted Truss, he said he wants to known as “a good constituency MP”.
He told the podcast: “We've really suffered over the last 14 years. I want to demonstrate to people what an MP can do for a local area.
“The fact that I'm intending to hold surgeries, some residents find that shocking, because we've not had it.
“The fact that we're going to have a public accessible office, wow, these shouldn't be shocks for people, this is what an MP should be doing.”
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