Conservative leadership race: Loyalty to PM stopped me quitting, says Liz Truss
Conservative leadership race contender Liz Truss has stressed her loyalty to PM Boris Johnson as she was questioned over why she did not join her colleagues in resigning to oust the PM from office.
Johnson allies favour Liz Tuss in the election race, the latest polling shows her in third place behind Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt.
Truss used her campaign launch to position herself as the most experienced to lead the party into the next general election – due to take place in January 2025.
Ms Truss is “under pressure” following her third-place result in the first ballot of Tory MPs. She has stressed her credentials on Brexit and defence whilst taking a swipe at Rishi Sunak as she warned now is not the time for “business-as-usual economic management.”
She refused to criticise second place Penny Mordaunt, who is posing a significant threat to Liz Truss.
“What we need to do now is deliver, deliver, deliver, and I am the person in this race with the record of delivery
Instead of laying into Penny Mordaunt “, she made much of her role in ripping up the Northern Ireland Protocol and standing up to Russia since the invasion of Ukraine,” writes the Independent.
Liz Truss launches campaign
Liz Truss has rejected the suggestion that her closeness to Boris Johnson could be a fatal weakness for her campaign.
She said: “I am a loyal person. I am loyal to Boris Johnson. I supported our Prime Minister’s aspirations and I want to deliver the promise of the 2019 manifesto.
“What we need to do now is deliver, deliver, deliver, and I am the person in this race with the record of delivery.”
Truss launched her campaign after Lord Frost launched a scathing attack on Penny Mordant – saying as his deputy she had lacked a grasp of detail and was unwilling to deliver tough messages to Brussels.
Asked about those accusations, Ms Truss said she would not be making any “disparaging comments” about her rival.
“The Conservative race shows what a broad range of talents we have in the Conservative Party. And we didn’t get there through identity politics,” she said.
“We didn’t get there through quotas. We got there because we are a meritocratic party that believes in the future of Britain.”
She told the launch that she wants to see defence spending rise to 3% of GDP by the end of the decade, repeating her pledge to reverse the rise in national insurance and stressing she agrees “completely” with the Government’s controversial Rwanda asylum policy.
She also made the suggestion that Government should treat the debt from the pandemic as something to pay off over a longer period of time, offering a way to cover the cost of tax reductions.
In her speech, she said she would be ready to be “prime minister from day one”.
She added: “I will campaign as a Conservative and I will govern as a Conservative.”
She opened her speech with a clear message: “We are at a critical moment for our country.
“Now is the time to be bold, we cannot have business-as-usual economic management, which has led to low growth for decades.”
To shouts of “hear, hear”, she said it is time to deliver on Brexit and “win the fight for freedom” at home and abroad.
Iain Duncan Smith, Nadine Dorries and Therese Coffey were in the audience as Kwasi Kwarteng introduced Ms Truss to the room.
The Foreign Secretary said: “There isn’t a great groundswell of support in the country for (Labour leader) Sir Keir Starmer or (Liberal Democrat leader) Sir Ed Davey.
“What the British people are crying out for is a modern and united Conservative Party, ready with the courage of its convictions to deliver on the promises that we have made.”
Conservative leadership race – what’s happened so far
The leadership race has been blown ‘wide open’ following the first round.
So far outsiders and relatively junior contenders – Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch.
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