LIZ TRUSS: 'Spreadsheet man' Sunak ran Tory train into the buffers

It was nearly the end of the line but a lengthy freight train lumbering along to the town of King's Lynn was blocking the way. I looked impatiently at the level crossing barriers, which had just come down as we approached the leisure centre where the general election count for the South West Norfolk constituency was being held.

We were already late. We'd only been given ten minutes' notice that the declaration was about to be made and were still finishing breakfast at a 24-hour McDonald's when the call came through. The level crossing was the final straw.

I knew the outcome already. All that night the news had been getting worse. The exit poll had me winning and retaining the seat I'd held since 2010 - latterly with a 26,195 majority - but reports from the count went from 'it's too tight to call' to 'it's not looking good'.

I arrived and rushed straight on to the stage where the other candidates were waiting. From a standing start, the candidate from Nigel Farage's Reform UK had secured 9,958 votes – more than 22 per cent of those voting. I got 11,217 votes, but the Labour candidate was 630 votes ahead of me and was declared the victor. And in my heart of hearts, I was not entirely surprised.

Throughout the campaign, I had been hearing people who were fed up with Conservative failure on the economy, immigration and public services and felt motivated by Farage. We Conservatives had been in government for 14 years and were asking to be re-elected, but living standards had gone down, taxes had gone up and we had let both legal and illegal immigration get out of control. People were fed up with feeling that things were broken.

And despite having a nominally Conservative government, Left-wing ideology, from Keynesian economics to human rights activism, was running rife through the institutions of the state.

I was also in a difficult personal position. The Conservative Party leader, Rishi Sunak, had been complicit in amplifying Labour's lies and spreading smears about me and my premiership. He claimed that he had been appointed Prime Minister to 'fix' my 'mistakes' and went so far as to describe my tax-cutting economic agenda - to which party members had given their overwhelming endorsement at the time - as a 'fantasy'.

As well as having plotted to remove Boris Johnson, he and his acolytes had pursued a scorched-earth policy of trying to rubbish everything I had sought to do. No wonder my running under his banner in the general election had sent out a mixed message to electors.

The fact is that the Reform manifesto seemed more conservative than the official Conservative one. Even some of those who agreed with my views were simply not willing to put their cross in my box because they felt it would be an endorsement of Rishi as Prime Minister.

I was far from alone. Everywhere, rock-solid Conservative seats fell that night. Virtually all that was left from the 372 seats that the Tories entered the election defending was a cadre of just 121 MPs. It was the Conservatives' worst election result since the party's founding in 1834.

Unfortunately, Reform had succeeded in knocking out some of the most conservative MPs: friends and allies such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Richard Drax, Scott Mann, Brendan Clarke-Smith, Damien Moore and Nick Fletcher – all of whom were resolutely for controlling immigration, fighting wokery and making energy affordable by using oil and gas.

Meanwhile, some of the wokest Conservative MPs held their seats. It wasn't so much survival of the fittest as survival of the wettest.

I don't blame Farage for this. Many of us tried to get Reform to stand down in particular seats, but there was such frustration with the Conservative Party as a whole – and the party leadership – that Reform refused to play ball.

At the 2019 general election, Reform's previous incarnation, the Brexit Party, had pulled its candidates out of the race in all seats that Conservatives were defending. This was in order to support Boris Johnson's effort to 'get Brexit done'. But they were disappointed with what the Conservative government then delivered and vowed not to be hoodwinked again. So Reform candidates squared up to Conservatives across the length and breadth of the country.

The impact of this split was stark. The combined Conservative and Reform vote share eclipsed the victor in no fewer than 176 seats. While I am not suggesting that every Reform voter would have voted Conservative, or vice versa, it is clear that the divide on the right gifted Labour a huge majority in the House of Commons that they did not deserve on their own merit.

People were simply frustrated with the state the country was in and the lack of realistic plans to fix things or analysis of what the problem was. 'Nothing seems to work in this country any more,' I was told on countless occasions during the campaign.

People complained that they couldn't get a GP slot when they wanted one; they couldn't even find an NHS dentist, let alone get an appointment; they couldn't afford to get on the housing ladder because demand for housing was massively outstripping supply; and the roads were filled with potholes. The list could go on.

And all this despite the fact that the amount of money spent by the state had grown to a larger proportion than at any time since the Second World War.

And then there was the authoritarian, preachy nannying from the government that riled so many. Ministers telling people what kind of boiler they were allowed to have in their home, that they would have to get rid of their petrol car at great expense, dictating that they should dispense with plastic straws and instead use paper ones which go soggy before you've finished using them, and that they were going to make smoking illegal for anyone born after January 2009.

On the doorstep, Conservative campaigners would point out that voting Reform was liable to help return a Labour or Lib Dem MP, but all too often the voters would counter that they didn't care because there was little difference between us all anyway. There was almost a hunger in the air for revolution and Reform provided putative revolutionaries with a way of signifying their opposition to the status quo.

The infamous quote from George Galloway that the Conservative and Labour parties were two cheeks of the same backside resonated. And some would say that since the change of government on July 4, this has been all but confirmed: considerable chunks of Labour's first King's Speech featured Bills that had been put forward by the Conservatives.

The general election was the culmination of the non-event of Rishi's premiership, preceded as it was by 18 months of inaction where everyone was left wondering why he wanted the job of prime minister in the first place, except to get it on his CV.

He emerged from nowhere as a newly selected candidate before the 2015 election. I confess that I was initially impressed with him. He was fluent, lucid and intelligent. But over time it became hard to understand what he was there for.

He bears all the hallmarks of a classic investment banker: fluent in meetings and explaining things but with no original ideas of his own or any principles to speak of and unable to deal with others challenging him.

When, under Boris, I was foreign secretary and he was chancellor, I wanted to drastically reduce the amount of funding we were sending to the World Bank (to which we were the second largest contributor) because the money was being misspent. The chief secretary to the Treasury, Simon Clarke, agreed with me, but Treasury civil servants didn't like the idea – not least because many of them aspired to a sinecure there before their retirement.

Rishi objected on their behalf, and he and I had a tetchy phone call where he basically refused even to discuss the issue.

He often didn't show up to meetings. I recall an important one about the future of the steel industry attended by Boris, me and Kwasi Kwarteng as business secretary. Rishi sent a functionary instead of coming himself.

On another occasion, we had a row about which department was responsible for freeports. As chancellor, he removed responsibility for them from me as international trade secretary – and then allowed them to become pale imitations of the low-tax, low-regulation zones they were in other countries as he capitulated to the Whitehall bureaucracy.

Rishi was very much a creature of the Whitehall machine, reflecting the Treasury stance of being pro-immigration, anti-divergence from the EU and sceptical about the Rwanda policy. From the start his leadership was lacklustre and it never got any better.

Indeed, it got progressively worse as he failed to deliver a successful outcome for most of the 'five priorities' he announced shortly after he took office. Quite why he chose to highlight 'stop the boats' as one of these priorities I will never know.

It was clear to me that the flow of illegal immigrants arriving via the English Channel was never going to be stopped while we remained hidebound by the legal strictures of the Human Rights Act. But given that repealing the act would have taken more than two years, which was more than the remaining time the Conservatives had in office before the election, he was making promises he couldn't deliver.

By promising to solve the issue during the course of 2023 without any solution in sight, he was setting himself up, along with the rest of us in the party, for the most almighty fall.

The only priority he could realistically claim was properly fulfilled was halving inflation – and yet that was principally the responsibility of the Bank of England. It was disingenuous of him to take credit for it and it only further confused people about who should be accountable for what.

On his watch, the economy remained stagnant – as I predicted it would do without serious action to unleash economic growth. And since Rishi was unwilling to take on the economic establishment and had trashed all the policies I had advocated – tax cuts, supply-side reforms and so on – he was unable to pursue that course himself. He may have talked about 'making tough decisions' and doing 'whatever it takes', but when push came to shove, he didn't.

Meanwhile, the centre-piece of his speech to what would be the pre-election party conference was the smoking ban – a deeply unconservative proposal, designed to infantilise adults by limiting their personal freedom. Conservatives have always fundamentally believed that people are better than government at making decisions about what's best for them and their families. This was a Conservative government seeking to do exactly the opposite.

The final months of his premiership were painful for all of us Conservatives in Parliament as our poll ratings continually worsened and the chances of us retaining our seats diminished. When I left office and Rishi became leader in October 2022, Reform's poll rating had been around the 3 per cent mark. By the time he called the election, they were consistently in double figures on around 12 per cent and were exceeding 14 per cent by polling day.

The blame for that lies entirely on Rishi's shoulders. Instead of acknowledging the truth about the difficult state the country was in, he tried to press release his way to success. He was fundamentally dishonest about illegal immigration, taxes, growth and inflation.

Yet it needs to be acknowledged that this dishonesty was not limited to him. It was also reflected in the bulk of the parliamentary party. The reason Rishi was not removed by MPs when he was leading us to consistently disastrous poll ratings and a dire performance against his own targets is that most of them shared his belief in the establishment narrative. They fundamentally misunderstand Britain.

It is also why he has not been properly taken to task for the worst Conservative defeat in 200 years. The Conservative parliamentary party did not want to acknowledge their complicity in backing the status quo over the real change the country needed – and still needs.

It is clear that if Boris had remained in place, we would have got a better election result. Or if I had been given a chance to deliver my economic agenda and more robust policies, we would not have haemorrhaged millions of votes to Reform. But with a leader devoid of charisma and who stood for the status quo, we were done for.

The two biggest causes of our election defeat were our handling of immigration and the economy. At no point was there a serious debate within the party about what our post-Brexit immigration stance should actually be.

After Brexit, I think it came as a surprise to many Cabinet ministers – probably including Boris Johnson! - how high legal net migration was (up to 700,000). The Treasury – which was institutionally anti-Brexit – pushed for the most liberal immigration rules possible to mitigate, as they saw it, the end of free movement.

At the same time, the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast higher fiscal benefits from higher immigration, but their economic modelling was flawed and their forecasts way out in terms of the actual numbers. (They have now produced new modelling, changing their view after it was too late.)

Illegal immigration was even less understood. Unless you had been a minister in the Home Office or justice department, it was hard to understand the extent to which the courts could block illegal immigrants from being deported.

I had personal experience of this as justice secretary and saw the way government support, in the form of legal aid, was being given to lawyers, who would make themselves available on the end of the phone for the illegal immigrants the Home Office was trying to deport. The immigrants would be on the tarmac at Heathrow on a plane about to take off and phone their lawyers. I managed to stop some of this abuse, but I was shocked by the legislative hurdles that were put in my way.

Our other major failing was on economic policy. A Conservative government raising taxes was a huge mistake but proponents of the Gordon Brown tax-and-spend economic orthodoxy were deeply embedded in government and Rishi was the natural successor to this way of thinking.

We should have been cutting not only taxes but the size of government in order to grow the economy. But we allowed the size and scope of the state to balloon. How often, in office, was the Conservative government's answer to a problem to increase rather than decrease regulation? Or to increase the amount of state interference in our lives? Far too often, I'm afraid.

To add to all these woes, the Conservatives' general election campaign was utterly hopeless, thanks to Rishi. For a start, the entire party was caught off-guard by his announcing the election out of the blue. Ironically, Labour was more ready for the electoral battle and had far more candidates in place, whereas most Conservatives had believed the election wasn't happening until the autumn and had made other plans.

The policies he was promoting were hopeless and gimmicky – such as the ill-thought-out plan for a modern form of National Service. My 15-year-old daughter Liberty was horrified by this idea as she would be first in line. I said that given Rishi's opinion poll ratings, she was unlikely to be wearing army fatigues any time soon!

He also decided to criticise conservative principles – and me in particular. His so-called tax cuts had no impact on poll ratings as the overall tax burden had gone up. The public could see through these gimmicks. I found the whole thing deeply depressing, so simply turned off the TV and ignored the national media to focus on what I was doing locally.

Yet it would be wrong, however, to lay all the blame on Rishi and his hapless team. The reality is that the seeds for the electoral drubbing of 2024 were sown back in the 1990s and 2000s – as I will explain tomorrow.

Adapted from Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss (Biteback, £10.99), to be published on November 7. © Liz Truss 2024. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid to 15/11/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. 

Cronyism at Tory HQ Office filtered out true conservatives in favour of the soggy centre 

The crisis in the Conservative Party has not been helped by the culture and actions of Central Office (now renamed CCHQ, Conservative Campaign Headquarters). It became more and more distant from our activist base and cronyism bedevilled the candidate selection process.

The machinations of the candidates' department have long been shrouded in mystery, with far too much influence being wielded by shadowy figures in the background, making or breaking the potential careers of countless potential MPs.

Local associations have had a historic right to pick their candidates, but over time the centre has sought to wield more and more influence over the process. It was no longer simply a case of having a central list of approved candidates to weed out the mad, the bad and the sad. Rather, the panjandrums from the candidates' department would heavily lean on associations to consider a favoured few.

Assessments of political values and actual beliefs seemed to be superseded by HR-inspired evaluations of adherence to questionable DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) policies.

By the time of July's general election, there were some shameful stitch-ups taking place: well-placed local candidates were prevented from reaching shortlists in favour of outsiders who would do the leadership's bidding, while in other seats shortlists of local candidates were handed down to stop right-wingers from elsewhere getting a look in.

Meanwhile, selections in a number of seats were inexplicably delayed so CCHQ could impose shortlists on the eve of the election. The most scandalous example was in Basildon and Billericay, where the incumbent MP John Baron had announced his intention to retire in October 2023, giving plenty of time for a successor to be chosen in an open competition.

Instead, CCHQ never opened the process and, a matter of days before the close of nominations, handed the local association a shortlist of one - the party chairman, Richard Holden, who was nominally in charge of CCHQ. This caused uproar locally, and he would only hold the seat by 20 votes on election night.

The effect of all these machinations was generally to filter out true conservatives in favour of those from the soggy centre.

• Adapted from Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss (Biteback, £10.99), to be published on November 7. © Liz Truss 2024. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid to 15/11/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.