Liz Truss: Tories would have done better at election if I was still PM

Liz Truss today claimed that the Tories would have done better at the general election if she had remained prime minister.

In a punchy appearance at the Conservative Party Conference the former leader, who was forced from office in 2022 after her disastrous mini-budget, stopped short of saying she could have beaten Keir Starmer.

But she defiantly claimed that she would have done a better job than successor Rishi Sunak.

In a cosy chat with the Daily Telegraph the former MP also said that critics of her mini-budget, which sent the markets into turmoil and led to interest rates spiking, were guilty of 'economic illiteracy'.

She went on to say that 'powerful institutions' like the Bank of England 'sought to undermine me' and make her a scapegoat for their own mistakes.

'The Tories are no longer the party of the establishment,' she said.

She also repeated her backing for Donald Trump to win the US presidential election and launched an attack on 'wokeism'.

Asked if the country under Labour was 'on the road to socialism', the former prime minister told the Telegraph's Tim Stanley: 'We are already a socialist country.

'We have huge swathes of the economy controlled by regulation and the bureaucracy,' she said.

Ms Truss said this was a 'cumulative effect' of Brown and Blairite policies and then decisions by Tories who came after.

The former prime minister said she does not think the Conservatives can say all the problems are caused by Labour.

'A lot of the problems we are facing now are as a result of us failing to turn things around,' she said.

As well as criticising Mr Sunak she also levelled criticism at predecessor but one Theresa May, who used a newspaper article at the weekend to attack the mini-Budget.

Ms Truss made a quip about the 2017 election, in which Mrs May squandered the Tory majority, before saying she did not want to get into a 'slanging match'.

She added the four Tory leadership candidates have not acknowledged how bad things are in the party.

'So far, I haven't seen any of the candidates really acknowledge how bad things are in the country as a whole, and frankly, for the Conservative Party.

The former prime minister said there was a 'Panglossian' view among them that the party needs to unite.

They think 'all we need to do is show competence, and we will be ushered back into office', she said, adding: 'They have to explain what went wrong, why things are so bad for the Conservatives and what they're actually going to do.'

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: 'Liz Truss's failure to recognise the economic vandalism that she oversaw is a kick in the teeth to all those who endured their mortgage rates spiralling and were worried about losing their homes as a result of her disastrous policies.

'It's outrageous that instead of calling out the damage that she did, the Conservative Party actually allowed her to stand as one of their candidates at the General Election.

'Every Conservative Party Leadership candidate must condemn Truss's terrible record and pledge that they would strip her of her ex-PM allowance of up to £115,000 a year.'