Former prime minister Liz Truss has accused Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch of not telling the truth about the “real failures of 14 years of Conservative government”. Writing in the Telegraph, Truss said: “If she’s not willing to tell the truth to her own supporters, the Conservative party is in serious trouble.”
Truss’s criticism followed a Telegraph article by Badenoch in which she compared the current Labour government’s policies to Truss’s disastrous mini-budget of 2022. Badenoch argued that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves had not learned the lessons of the mini-budget and were making even bigger mistakes.
In her own article, Truss claimed her mini-budget would have helped the UK escape a “doom-loop” of low growth and high taxes, but was sabotaged by the Bank of England, the Treasury, and Conservative MPs. She added: “Labour is doing the opposite of the mini-budget, which is why the country is headed for disaster.”
Truss has been attempting to rewrite the narrative around her 45-day premiership. She faced mockery from the campaign group Led By Donkeys, which unfurled a banner during one of her appearances bearing the phrase: “I crashed the economy,” alongside a picture of a lettuce – a reference to a Daily Star stunt comparing her longevity to a supermarket iceberg lettuce.
The former prime minister also criticised Badenoch for repeating “spurious narratives” to divert from the failures of Conservative governments in which her supporters were implicated.
