Liz Truss Claims She Would Have Performed Better Than Rishi Sunak At The Election
3 min read
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss has claimed she would have performed better at the general election than Rishi Sunak.
At Conservative Party conference, the former prime minister was in conversation with The Telegraph in front of a packed out 300-seater hall. Asked if she would have performed better than Sunak on 4 July when the Tories were reduced to 121 seats, Truss said “Yes I do.”
“When I was in No 10, Reform was polling at three per cent,” she said. By the time we got to the election, I mean they got 18 per cent because we promised change that we didn’t deliver.
She went on: “Now, of course without the support of the parliamentary party it was very, very difficult for me to get my changes through. And if you have people in the parliamentary party saying ‘this is Liz Truss’s fault this has happened’... it is very difficult for me to deliver that change.”
Truss is the United Kingdom’s shortest-serving prime minister after serving 49 days in Downing Street. However, polls showed just 19 per cent of voters were set to vote Tory shortly before she stepped down as party leader, which was lower than the party's rating when the 2024 election was called.
The Tories suffered their worst defeat in 200 years after having had three prime ministers within five years. The party’s vote share fell by more than 20 per cent across the country.
Asked whether she was impressed with any of the four candidates so far, Truss said she was not particularly enthused by the remaining contenders.
“So far, I haven’t really seen any of the candidates acknowledge how bad things are in the country as a whole and frankly for the Conservative Party,” she said.
“They have to explain what went wrong, why things are so bad for the Conservatives and what they’re actually going to do. Now take energy prices. Now I haven’t heard anybody advocating for fracking, I haven’t heard a serious discussion about oil and gas or coal,” she added.
Truss said Britain was already a "socialist” country which could be gripped with an acute economic crisis within the next three to four years.
She blamed successive Conservative and Labour governments for following “Keynesian” economic orthodoxy of higher spending and lower taxes, as well as outsourcing decisions to the Bank of England, being decided by the Office of Budget Responsibility.
Asked what gave her hope for the future of the West, she claimed the victory of Donald Trump as US President could help turn the tide on “socialists” winning in rich countries.
“Trump winning in America will be a sign that the tide is turning. At present we have Keir Starmer in London, we’ve got socialists in Australia, Canada, America, France, Germany. We need to start turning the tide the other way, and this will be the first domino. Trump is anti-establishment.”
In a recent intervention, Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch said that not all cultures were of equal value and worth. Truss said she agreed with this statement.
“I think she meant that this country is based on Judeo-Christian values, and that is what should prevail.”
Truss declined to say whether she would be tempted to run again as an MP after losing her own seat in South West Norfolk. Labour won the seat with a local candidate and councillor, as Reform UK surged in popularity in the constituency.
The former prime minister said the result was a fluke and the seat would return to Conservative hands at the next election. But she said she was content with working within the private sector and wanted to make the case for libertarian and conservative ideals outside Parliament.
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