Truss: 'I'd have done better than Sunak in the election'

Liz Truss has claimed that the Tories would have performed better at July’s general election if she had clung on as prime minister.

- ARCHIE MITCHELL

The former PM, who sensationally lost her seat in the party’s landslide defeat, said that if she had not been forced out of Downing Street in the wake of her disastrous September 2022 mini-Budget, she would have secured a better result for the Conservatives than Rishi Sunak.

In a packed event on the sidelines of the Tory conference, Ms Truss admitted that winning the general election would have been “a tall order”. But she said she would have been able to stop the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK if she had been given enough time to let her tax-cutting policies take effect.

In the end, Ms Truss lost her South West Norfolk seat to Labour’s Terry Jermy, with Reform taking thousands of votes from the former PM.

Addressing the most high-energy event of the conference so far, Ms Truss told the Tory rank and file: “When I was in No 10, Reform was polling at 3 per cent. By the time we got to the election, I think they got 18 per cent, because we promised change that we did not deliver. Now of course, without the support of the parliamentary party, it was very difficult for me to get my changes through.”