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The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, is not telling the truth about the “real failures of 14 years of Conservative government”, the former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has said.
Writing in the Telegraph, Truss said: “In a recent speech Kemi said: ‘From now on, we are going to be telling the British people the truth even when it is difficult to hear.’ If she’s not willing to tell the truth to her own supporters, the Conservative party is in serious trouble.”
Truss’s comments came after Badenoch’s own Telegraph article in which she claimed the current Labour government was failing to heed the warnings of the disastrous mini-budget that defined Truss’s short-lived premiership.
The former prime minister has been fighting a desperate battle to rewrite the narrative around her 45 days in office in 2022. She released a memoir and embarked on a campaign tour that allowed her to talk up her record and offer her views on the political landscape in the UK and US.
In her Telegraph article, she claimed her mini-budget would have helped the UK escape a “doom-loop” of low growth and high taxes. “Yet, it was sabotaged by the Bank of England and the Treasury – which didn’t want to be challenged and wanted to cover up their failings – and Conservative MPs who either didn’t believe in supply-side economics or cravenly wanted preferment under a Sunak premiership.”
But Truss has faced an uphill battle – not least when she was mocked by the campaign group Led By Donkeys, which unfurled a banner during one of her appearances bearing the phrase: “I crashed the economy.” It also included a picture of a lettuce – a reference to a Daily Star livestream stunt that sought to determine whether Truss’s battle to survive in No 10 could last longer than a 60p iceberg lettuce from Tesco.
Illustrating her criticism of the current Labour government, Badenoch invoked Truss’s failures in No 10. “Picture the scene: a new prime minister and chancellor spending billions without also making the necessary savings to offset their splurge and balance the books. The markets react adversely, interest rates spike and the cost of living gets worse with prices soaring.
“For all their mocking of Liz Truss, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have not learnt the lessons of the mini-budget and are making even bigger mistakes,” she wrote in the Telegraph on Saturday.
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Hitting back, Truss wrote: “She is wrong. Labour is doing the opposite of the mini-budget, which is why the country is headed for disaster.”
And listing several policy recommendations that place her close to the US president, Donald Trump, politically, Truss added: “It is disappointing that, instead of serious thinking like this, Kemi Badenoch is instead repeating spurious narratives. I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated.”
