How England’s Conservative New Prime Minister Liz Truss won the battle for No 10 Downing Street
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How England’s Conservative New Prime Minister Liz Truss won the battle for No 10 Downing Street
Edward Malnick - Saturday
While the seeds of Liz Truss’s leadership bid may have been sown months, or even years, earlier, the campaign took off in earnest in the absence of its protagonist.
Liz Truss - DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images© DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images
A core group of current and former advisers were dotted around London in parliamentary offices, living rooms and discreet corners of cafes, while the Foreign Secretary herself concluded meetings with counterparts in Indonesia before spending more than 15 hours on a flight back to the UK.
On Saturday July 9, the fledgling campaign team assembled around their candidate’s kitchen table in Greenwich to map out a plan to beat Conservative rivals to the door of Number 10 Downing Street.
Ms Truss’s husband, Hugh O’Leary, served up lunch, while her daughters Frances, 16, and Liberty, 14, were on hand to provide advice and suggestions, in what would become a feature of the two-month campaign.
Ms Truss initially decided to remain at the G20 summit in Bali following Boris Johnson’s resignation on July 7. The official reason given by aides was the gravity of the issues on the agenda, which included the global approach to the war in Ukraine.
However, Ms Truss was also keen to avoid the appearance that she was rushing back to Westminster to join a feeding frenzy of Tories seeking to seize on the Prime Minister’s announcement to realise their leadership ambitions.
That restraint was also evident in Ms Truss’s decision to remain in Mr Johnson’s government over the past year despite speaking out in Cabinet against key policies including the National Insurance rise.
Even when Sajid Javid, the then health secretary, and Rishi Sunak, long considered Ms Truss’s major potential rival, quit their posts on July 5, the Foreign Secretary held firm. But by then, of course, she was on the home straight of her plan.
Liz Truss - Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street© Provided by The Telegraph
“It’s in her interests for him to survive,” one friend said of Ms Truss in February, when the wagons were beginning to circle around Mr Johnson over the partygate scandal.
“If Boris leaves on a low point in the next month, it’s a very easy campaign for Rishi and Jeremy [Hunt] to run.” In such circumstances, either potential rival could sweep to victory by pitching themselves as the “safe, competent pair of hands” who would clean up the perceived mess left by the former prime minister.
Supporters of Ms Truss had discussed how she could pitch herself as “Boris without the tax rises” if Mr Johnson left in more positive circumstances.
The friend also insisted that Ms Truss was “massively loyal” and a big supporter of Mr Johnson - a stance that would later prove crucial in her pitch to Tory members - some of whom saw the resignation of dozens of ministers in July as an effective coup against their party leader.
The team that came together around Ms Truss’s kitchen table included Ruth Porter, a former aide and now a managing director at FGS Global, an influential communications firm, Adam Jones, Ms Truss’s political media adviser at the Foreign Office, Jason Stein, another former aide also now working at FGS, and four other Foreign Office advisers: Sophie Jarvis, Sarah Ludlow, Jamie Hope and Reuben Solomon, her digital guru.
The MPs present from the outset were Therese Coffey, the Work and Pensions Secretary and a close friend of the Foreign Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary who had moved into the same Greenwich street earlier this year, James Cleverly, Ms Truss’s deputy at the Foreign Office, Chloe Smith, a minister under Dr Coffey, Ranil Jayawardana, another rising star who had worked under Ms Truss at the Department for International Trade, and Wendy Morton, a transport minister.
Over the next 48 hours, the group would agree the outline of Ms Truss’s pitch, devise a plan to rapidly recruit more MPs to the campaign, and put together a campaign launch video. Ms Truss made telephone calls to MPs from one of her daughters’ bedrooms upstairs.
Two days earlier, Alec Shelbrooke, a backbencher representing a Yorkshire seat, became the first MP to publicly back Ms Truss to become leader - even before she had declared herself a candidate. Dehenna Davison, the Red Wall MP from the 2019 intake, would follow suit in a television interview on the Friday evening before Ms Truss’s return.
Profile Liz Truss© Provided by The Telegraph
Creating a sense of momentum was key, with each campaign at pains to give the sense that their candidate was the one MPs were falling behind.
Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, had got out of the blocks first, calling for Mr Johnson to quit and announcing her own candidacy in an interview on July 6. Steve Baker, the influential former Brexit minister, was the first of a series of prominent figures to back her.
By the time Ms Truss joined the discussions in her kitchen on July 9, Mr Sunak had already released a slick video setting out his own leadership credentials, along with the all-important back story about his time as a youngster working in his family’s pharmacy - and supporters were beginning to go public on social media.
That evening, Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid would launch their own separate leadership bids in interviews in this newspaper.
Meanwhile, Gerard Lyons, an influential free-market economist who previously advised Mr Johnson, endorsed Penny Mordaunt in a separate article and revealed that she would cut fuel taxes further and cancel the planned corporation tax hike. Ms Mordaunt would also, said Dr Lyons, resist “Treasury orthodoxy” and take action to ensure “the Bank of England keeps inflation at bay”.
Alarm bells began ringing among Ms Truss’s supporters. Now the Foreign Secretary, who had first come close to a tilt for the leadership following Theresa May’s departure in 2019, risked being outflanked by an insurgent apparently preparing to espouse chunks of the approach Ms Truss had been privately signalling that she wished to take in the campaign.
Ms Truss’s pitch would be simple: she would deliver a “clear Conservative philosophy” and Conservative agenda on the economy, rooted in lower taxes and supply-side reforms. Her track record publicly championing the virtue of free markets for more than a decade would mean that MPs and members will “trust her to deliver that”, her allies had concluded. The campaign would also focus on her record of delivering policies and trade agreements as a minister in five government departments.
The scale of support among Tory MPs for Ms Mordaunt took rival camps by surprise, and she soon faced anonymous attacks over what detractors claimed was her sympathy with “woke” policies and ideas. Following a slick launch at which the trade minister was flanked by supporters including Dame Andrea Leadsom, David Davis and George Freeman, a new poll put her in top place among Tory members.
Ms Truss’s supporters began mobilising against Ms Mordaunt.
Truss Channel 4 - Victoria Jones/PA Wire© Provided by The Telegraph
The following morning, Lord Frost, who had preceded Ms Truss as post-Brexit negotiator, attacked his colleague in an interview in which he warned that she had failed to “master the necessary detail” and sometimes he “didn't even know where she was” when she was his deputy at the Cabinet Office. A few days later, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Ms Mordaunt’s superior at the trade department, launched an even more devastating attack, accusing her fellow Brexiteer of skipping ministerial meetings in recent months to prepare her leadership bid.
Allies believe that the public interventions by Lord Frost and Ms Trevelyan got through to, and spooked, undecided MPs faster than Ms Mordaunt’s campaign team could reach them to sell their candidate.
The following week Ms Truss leapfrogged Ms Mordaunt to make it to the final round of the contest, against Mr Sunak, having already seen off Mrs Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat, Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zahawi. She had been particularly aided by the support of key pro-Brexit figures such as Mrs Braverman, Mr Baker and Lord Frost, who rejected Mr Sunak’s criticism of her prior support for Remain to insist that she was the candidate to fully deliver on the 2016 result.
The counter-offensive against Ms Mordaunt came alongside a relentless ground operation to woo MPs, which would transform into a nationwide mission to put Ms Truss in front of as many party members as possible.
However, the public-facing stages of the campaign began on July 15 with a faltering performance by Ms Truss on the first television debate between candidates, which spooked even some of her most ardent supporters.
“We weren't prepared for it,” admitted one source, “because we didn’t think it would happen. We didn't prepare her properly.”
Both Ms Truss and Mr Sunak confirmed their attendance about 24 hours before the debate, with figures close to Ms Truss saying the Conservatives should never have allowed candidates to be subjected to a grilling on Channel 4, which is seen by insiders as particularly hostile to the party.
Following her underwhelming performance in the debate, Ms Truss went to Chevening, the foreign secretary’s country residence, in Kent, to spend time with her family on the Saturday, before returning to London for a solid day of debate preparation with aides and Rob Butler, an MP and former broadcaster who had acted as parliamentary private secretary to Ms Truss.
Her performance in the second television debate that evening marked a transformation.
Truss v Sunak take-home tax© Provided by The Telegraph
Mr Sunak’s initial campaign video revealed a central plank of his campaign: that he would run on a platform of resisting the “comforting fairy tales” of major tax cuts that would, he said, “leave our children worse off tomorrow”.
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