(Bloomberg) -- Liz Truss said she would have done better than Rishi Sunak in the UK election and declined to endorse any of the four Conservative candidates trying to succeed him, in a political intervention that underscored how Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister still holds significant sway in the Tory party.
Truss, whose disastrous budget that roiled financial markets in 2022 was seen as a major factor in the Conservatives Party’s historic defeat this year, issued a defiant defense of her premiership and right-wing policies on Monday. Her only scheduled appearance at the Tories’ annual conference in Birmingham was oversubscribed, and she was mobbed by party members as she left.
Though she conceded that any Tory premier would have struggled to hold off the Labour Party’s surge under Keir Starmer, Truss said her ideas would put the Conservative Party in a better position.
The problem for Truss is her so called mini-budget in September 2022 included £45 billion ($60 billion) of unfunded tax cuts that took the markets by surprise. The pound plunged to its lowest level ever against the dollar, while the Bank of England was forced to make an emergency intervention to support the bond market. In a vain attempt to salvage her premiership, Truss replaced her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, with Jeremy Hunt, but was out of a job herself after just 49 days.
On Monday, she accused the Tory MPs who ousted her of falling into line with the institutions — including the Bank of England and Office for Budget Responsibility — rather than getting behind her policies.
“If the mini-budget had been allowed to succeed, we’d have had lower corporation tax bringing more companies into this country, we’d have duty free shoppers coming to London rather than being diverted to Paris or Milan,” Truss said. Fracking was another policy she said would have helped prevent Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party from eating into the Tory vote.
Though Truss has repeatedly voiced similar complaints about her party, the fact she was so well received by delegates in Birmingham show how the Conservatives are struggling to shake off their tainted record in office. All four candidates were members of Sunak’s administration, and they’ve engaged in public spats about their ideas for the party.
Truss said she hadn’t seen any evidence they understood “why things are so bad for the Conservatives.”
She drew a bigger crowd to her event, which was hosted by the Telegraph newspaper, than any of the candidates. She repeatedly criticized BOE Governor Andrew Bailey and accused Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves of being part of the economic establishment.
She said she would devote her future career to saving “Western civilization” from what she-called “neo-Marxist orthodoxy.”
In his own address to the conference on Sunday, Sunak had urged the Tories not to “nurse old grudges but build new friendships.”
(Updates with details of Truss’s economic policies in fourth paragraph.)
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