Tory leadership hustings: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak vie for members’ support in Birmingham

Mel Stride, the Conservative chair of the Commons Treasury committee (and a Rishi Sunak supporter), has urged the government’s economic watchdog to produce fiscal forecasts alongside any emergency budget this autumn, after Liz Truss signalled she would try to avoid early scrutiny of her fiscal plans.

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Sunak has claimed that Truss would “spook” international investors if she threatened the independence of the Bank of England. (See 12.10pm.)

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A leading thinktank has criticised a plan from Scottish Power for the government to back a £100bn plan to freeze energy bills for two years. According to the BBC, Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary and probable chancellor in a Truss government, expressed some support for the idea at a private meeting last week. (See 2.35pm.) But Torsten Bell, head of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, has dismissed the proposal, which would involve energy companies borrowing the money, but the government underwriting the loans.

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We should definitely not do this
– needlessly complicated
– more expensive than the govt borrowing itself
– bad mechanism for paying back that borrowing (ie future bills) https://t.co/XXBxIwxqye

— Torsten Bell (@TorstenBell) August 23, 2022

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More constructively, we've got a paper out later this week on what we should do. The increase in the scale of the problem will require a different, not just a bigger, policy response.

— Torsten Bell (@TorstenBell) August 23, 2022

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The Labour MP Mary Foy has claimed a reporter broke into her office to find material about Beergate.

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That is all from me for today.

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A colleague will be picking up the blog later to cover the Tory leadership hustings in Birmingham at 7pm.

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Liz Truss has not won the Tory leadership contest yet, but already her team have been thinking hard about who would serve in her cabinet and there has been considerable speculation that she will appoint Suella Braverman, the attorney general, as her home secretary. (No one has spent much time wondering who would serve as home secretary under Rishi Sunak.) It it thought that Braverman will get the job as a reward for endorsing Truss when she was knocked out of the leadership contest herself, at a time when if Braverman had endorsed Kemi Badenoch instead, perhaps that might have given Badenoch the boost she needed to overtake Truss and become the lead candidate for the Tory right instead, going up against Sunak in the final ballot.

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But Priti Patel, the current home secretary, wants to remain in her post, and in an interview with Sky’s Jason Farrell she has made her case to stay. Asked if she wanted to keep her job, she replied:

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n

That’s the choice of the next leader. But the fact of the matter is this party was elected with a very clear manifesto commitment to beat crime, cut crime, but also deliver 20,000 more police officers. I think my record in that time speaks volumes.

n

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Patel has not endorsed publicly endorsed a candidate in the contest. Asked who she wanted to lead the party, she replied:

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n

I’m just not getting involved. I mean I’ve got a job to do. That’s what I’m focused on.

n

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EDT”,”blockLastUpdated”:1661269739000,”blockLastUpdatedDisplay”:”11.48 EDT”,”blockFirstPublished”:1661269739000,”blockFirstPublishedDisplay”:”11.48 EDT”,”blockFirstPublishedDisplayNoTimezone”:”11.48″,”title”:”Patel indicates she wants to stay as home secretary”,”contributors”:[],”primaryDateLine”:”Tue 23 Aug 2022 13.58 EDT”,”secondaryDateLine”:”First published on Tue 23 Aug 2022 03.52 EDT”},{“id”:”6304ea558f088e8ce8eaeec0″,”elements”:[{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

Liz Truss, the frontrunner in the Tory leadership contest, has faced criticism today over her record as environment secretary from 2014 to 2016. As Pippa Crerar and Helena Horton report, she cut the grant for the surveillance mechanisms in place to stop water companies polluting rivers.

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After serving as environment secretary, Truss spent a year as justice secretary and lord chancellor. Her performance in that job has also come under fire. In an interview with the House magazine to mark his retirement from the House of Lords at the age of 95, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, a very distinguished former Conservative lord chancellor, said that non-lawyers such as Truss and Chris Grayling were not suited to the role. He went on:

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I don’t know that Liz Truss had any idea of how legal aid was done either, when she was lord chancellor and justice secretary. You really need to know something about it.

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Read Nore:Tory leadership hustings: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak vie for members’ support in Birmingham