Happy Tory leadership results day! Much like teenagers collecting their A-levels, there will be plenty of tears, cheers and multiple beers, as one of either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick seizes the crown. But one person who might not be smiling this morning is Rishi Sunak, whose final morning as Conservative leader has been overshadowed by a no-holds-barred assault by his predecessor.
In today’s Daily Mail, a seething Liz Truss uses a 2,000-word article to eviscerate the man who replaced her as prime minister. Truss claims Sunak was ‘complicit in amplifying Labour’s lies and spreading smears about me and my premiership’. As premier, he was ‘fundamentally dishonest about illegal immigration, taxes, growth and inflation’ and acted as a mere ‘creature of the Whitehall machine.’ The only thing that saved him from being defenestrated in office was that ‘most’ Tory MPs ‘shared his belief in the establishment narrative’. Of those who survived the catastrophe of 4 July, she writes ‘it wasn’t so much survival of the fittest as survival of the wettest’ with many of the ‘wokest’ Tories clinging on in parliament.
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