3 weeks ago
Truss claims Tories would have done better at election if she had stayed as PM than they did under Sunak
Q: If you had stayed on and fought the election, do you think you would have done better than Rishi Sunak?
Truss replies: “Yes, I do.”
But, she says, without the support of Tory MPs, it was hard for her to get her changes thought.
And even people in the party were blaming her mini-budget for the problems with the economy.
UPDATE: See 1.41pm for the quote from Truss explaining why she thinks she would have done better than Sunak.
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Q: How do you defend voting remain in the Brexit referendum?
Tugendhat says he does not need to defend that. It is in the past. He has always accepted the result.
Q: Would you let the UK become closer to the EU?
Tugendhat says he will always defend UK sovereignty.
Q: Would you give Boris Johnson a job in the shadow cabinet?
Tugendhat praises Johnson for two things in particular: for standing up to Ukraine, and for appointing a vaccine taskforce, using the private sector, to find a vaccine as soon as the Covid pandemic struck.
Q: Would you like to see him come back in a byelection?
Tugendhat says he is not going to interfer in candidate selections. But if Johnsonn wants to stand, and members want to have him as a candidate, that is fine, he says.
Tugendhat dismisses call for electoral pact with Reform UK
Q: Do you favour an electoral deal with Reform UK? [See 2.04pm.]
Tugendhat says he wants to reform the Conservative party, not turn it into Reform UK.
Tugendhat bats away question about having least ministerial experience by stressing his combat record
Q: You have less ministerial experience than the other candidates. You were security minister for two years. Is that a worry?
Channel Ronald Reagan’s famous answer to a question about his age, Tugendhat (a former soldier, and a former chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee) says:
I’m not going to hold against anybody their inexperience in combat or their inexperience in foreign affairs …
I won’t hold against them, the areas where they didn’t serve our country and didn’t put their lives on the line. They have served in other ways, and I think we should respect that.
Tugendhat says he proud of his record as a minister.
I’ll stand on [my record]. Mine is two years keeping this country safe, introducing the Security Act, arresting and charging more Russian and Chinese agents in the previous decade, and reforming areas of our intelligence and security services and I’m never going to tell you about [ie, highly secret stuff].
Tugendhat apologises to members for how infighting at Westminster let them down at election
Tugendhat says he has a message for members about the general election.
It wasn’t this party that failed, it wasn’t the ideas that failed. It was the centre that failed, and we need to own that.
And so from my perspective, let me just say to all of you, I’m sorry, the infighting in Westminster, the chaos in Westminster, and then the campaign, they will let you down.
Q: Are you a wet?
Tugendhat objects to that term. He says Hope is using the language of the Conservative party’s enemies. Conservatives should be united, he says.
He says he refused to vote for an increase in national insurance, and he voted against vaccine passports.
Tom Tugendhat takes part in Q&A on main conference stage
Talking of GB News, Christopher Hope, the GB News political editor, has just arrived on stage at the conference. Hope has been asked by the Tories to host the Q&A sessions with all four leadership questions.
He says he will be asking “tough questions” but not “gotcha questions”. (Kemi Badenoch will approve.)
He says he will be asking questions for half an hour, and then taking questions from the audience for half an hour.
The first hour is devoted to Tom Tugendhat. Then Kemi Badenoch is up.
The other two candidates are getting the Chopper treatment (Chopper is Hope’s nickname, which he uses in the title for his podcast).
Tugendhat is on the platform too and, after a bit of small talk, Hope asks what Tugendhat learned from his time in the army.
Tugendhat says he has devoted his life to service, and protecting his country.
Q: Were you a spy?
Tugendhat says he was a uniformed intelligence officer.
Q: On the internet there are claims you were a spy?
Tugendhat says there are a lot of things on the internet.
Tories should form electoral pact with Reform UK, standing down where Farage might beat Labour, Jacob Rees-Mogg says
The Conservative party should form an electoral part with Reform UK, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, has said.
According to a report by Amy Gibbons for the Telegraph, Rees-Mogg, who lost his seat at the election, said that there are almost 100 seats won by Labour where Reform UK came second at the election. Rees-Mogg said:
What should we do? Well, let’s for once model ourselves on David Cameron and make a big generous offer ...
What if we were to say at the next election, as we did to the liberal unionists, we will not oppose Reform in those 98 seats? I would certainly be open to that as a real opportunity to Reform to win seats from Labour.”
I think it would help us, it will help them. And we will not win if we do not reunite.
All four Tory leadership have said they are focused on winning back voters from Reform UK, rather than doing a deal with Nigel Farage’s party, and so there seems little chance of Rees-Mogg’s idea being adopted in the near future. But a survey of Tory members in July found that more than a third of them were in favour of an electoral pact with Reform UK.
Rees-Mogg is one of the Tories most aligned with Reform UK. He and Farage are both leading presenters on GB News.
Robert Jenrick seems to have won the backing of the European Research Group, which represents hardline, pro-Brexit Tory MPs, Sky News reports.
At a fringe meeting this morning, John Redwood and Bill Cash, two ex-MPs who were leading figures in the group, said they felt the last government had failed to take advantage of the opportunities provided by Brexit. But Jenrick could turn things round, they said, according to Sky.
UK business confidence has dropped to its lowest level since the general election, as firms grow more pessimistic about the economic outlook, Graeme Wearden reports.
Why Truss thinks Tories would have done better at election if she had stayed as PM and leader
This is what Liz Truss said at the Telegraph fringe to explain why she said she thought the Tories would have done better at the election if she had stayed on as leader and PM. (See 12.51pm.)
When asked to explain why she thought she would have done better than Sunak, Truss replied:
Because when I was when I was in No 10, Reform was polling at 3%. By the time we got to the election, I think they got 18% because we promised change that we didn’t deliver.
[Reform UK hit 18% in at least one poll during the campaign, but in the election itself they got 14%.]
Of course, without the support of the parliamentary party, it was very, very difficult for me to get my changes through. And if you have people in the parliamentary party saying ‘It’s Liz Truss’s fault this has happened, not the Bank of London’s fault’, which is what people did and are still doing, it is very difficult for me to deliver that change.
But if the mini-budget had been allowed to succeed, we’d have lower corporation tax, bringing more companies into this country, not relocating to Ireland. We’d have duty free shoppers coming to London, rather than being diverted to Paris or Milan.
We’d have got on with fracking. One of the biggest reasons this country is stagnant is our high energy prices, which are now four times what they are in the United States. By now, fracking would be taking place in Britain, and I think they would have a serious impact with all those competitiveness.
Truss says she does not know yet if she will seek re-election to parliament
Q: What books would you recommend to turn a young person rightwing?
Truss recommends With No Apologies, Barry Goldwater’s memoir.
Q: Will you try to return to parliament?
Truss says she is still thinking about that.
But she says she is not going to give up on the ideological fight.
Stanley asks the audience if they want her back. They applaud to indicate they do – but not with massive enthusiasm.
Truss says the establishment used to be conservative, but now it is liberal left. But the Conservative party has not acknowledged that, she says.
Q: Why are there so few conservatives in academia?
Truss says conservatives stopped getting tenure.
She says they used to be viewed as a curiosity in academia. Now they are being hounded out.
She says the UK should follow Trump’s policy, and defund universities if they exclude rightwing voices.
Truss accuses the media of failing to scrutinise the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey properly. She says he failed on inflation. But journalists don’t cover this, she claims. “What on earth is the British media doing with its time?”
Truss wins applause from Tory activists by saying 'Trump might win' when asked to give them good news
Stanley says Truss is being very gloomy. Is there anything she can say to cheer them up.
Truss replies: “Trump might win.”
This gets the first proper round of applause from the audience.
Truss says the left have been winning the arguments globally. She goes on:
Trump winning in America will be a sign that the tide is turning because at present we have Keir Starmer in London, we’ve got socialists in Australia, Canada, America, France, Germany. We need to start turning the tide the other way. And this will be the first domino …
Trump is anti establishment. Yes, the Davos World Economic Forum elite do not like Donald Trump, and I take that as a good sign.
Stanley points out that the US courts don’t like Trump much either. He says he sympathises with her views, but other people will think supporting Trump like this is weird.
Truss says his record in office was a good one.
His foreign policy was much better. He held Iran to account. He took action on Ukraine and Russia in a way that Obama hadn’t. Yes, he was much tougher on China, but domestically, he did all the things that unleashed the American economy, supply side reforms, regulatory reforms, tax cuts, fracking, building oil pipelines. He made the American economy successful, and that is what Biden has been riding off despite some of his poorer economic policies.
