There are noticeably fewer people here at Tory conference in Birmingham this week. But one former MP can still reliably pack in the punters. Despite losing her seat in July, the ‘Liz Truss show’ shows no sign of any drop in enthusiasm, with some 300 conference attendees packing out a lecture theatre for a blast of sound thinking. A further hundred Tories were turned away at the door: proof, some say, that two years after her defenestration, Liz Truss is still yet to lose her appeal.
The former Tory premier was here this afternoon to do her sole event of the conference: a Daily Telegraph in-conversation with columnist Tim Stanley. The event proved to be vintage Truss, full of lines about the failings of Andrew Bailey, the OBR and the Fleet Street press. The Equality Act, she said, was to blame for the spread of ‘woke’ in Britain; Rachel Reeves was ‘pathetic’ for blaming her, rather than the Bank of England for the market meltdown of 2022.
What, asked Stanley, did she think Labour was getting right in office? ‘The only thing’, Truss replied was ‘the decriminalisation of the licence fee’, lambasting Starmer’s timidity on planning reform. Her boldest counter-factural was arguing that a Tory party led by her would have done better in an election than that led by Rishi Sunak in July 2024: ‘Reform was on three per cent when I left No. 10.’ No mention was made of the fact that Labour was on 56 per cent.
The assembled hacks though were less interested in Truss’s reflections on the past and more her plans for the future. Is she planning to back a leadership candidate? No, she replied, to sighs of relief no doubt from the four remaining candidates. In her eyes, none of the ‘Panglossian’ quartet have acknowledged ‘how bad things are in the country right now… they think “all we need to do is show competence and we will be ushered back into office”, they have to explain what went wrong, why things are so bad for the Conservatives and what they’re going to do.’
What about Truss’s own plans? ‘I’ve only been out of parliament for a few months so I’m currently thinking about what to do’ she replied, with a familiar glint in her eyes. ‘I’m not going to give up on this fight’ she insisted, adding later ‘It’s the fight. I enjoy the fight… I’ll win it and I’ll fight it in whatever way I can.’ After some prompting by Stanley, a big cheer met with Truss’s suggestion that she might re-stand in five years’ time. As for her own defeat in July, she put the blame squarely on the split on the right, saying ‘I lost my seat largely due to Reform… I was frankly in quite a difficult position because I was running under a very orthodox Conservative Party while being an unorthodox Conservative myself.’
The packed out crowd of party supporters suggest there remains a keen interest in Liz Truss, who remains defiant in defeat. But given the lack of interest among the four contenders in securing her nomination, there seems to be little appetite for explicitly articulating an overtly Trussite message next time around.
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