Liz Truss’s comments about tax and unemployment

At the end of last week Liz Truss, the clear frontrunner in the Tory leadership contest, gave an interview to the Financial Times in which she appeared to rule using benefits or one-off payments to help people with their energy bills this winter. She told the paper:

This controversy caused a backlash and her campaign, for the second time in a week, responded by saying she had been misinterpreted. But this controversy is probably more significant than the one surrounding her proposal for regional public sector pay, which she was able to bury with a hasty, on-the- day U-turn. As my colleague Aubrey Allegretti reports, the Truss campaign has said they are not ruling out any further handouts to help people with the cost of living crisis this autumn. But Truss has not resiled from the main point she was making in the FT interview, which was that she believes that the priority should be cutting tax. When she talks about the Conservative way, she also used in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday, she is referring to the long-standing Conservative belief that rather than having the state take money from people through tax and then give it back to them, it is generally preferable to let them keep it in the first place.

The approach doesn't work when people are in dire poverty and need urgent financial support to buy food and stay warm during the winter. This is a point that Rishi Sunak has been making, and he has done it forcibly this morning in an article in the Sun. It is worth quoting from it at some length. The former chancellor says :

Liz's plan to deal with that is to give a big bung to businesses and the well-off, leaving those who need help most in the cold. She has said she will not provide direct support to those who are feeling the pinch most. The health and social care levy will give the average worker around 170. Someone on the national living wage will get less than 60 for the year. And her corporation tax cuts don't benefit small businesses - they just put money back into the coffers of the biggest companies with the largest profits. We need clear-eyed realism, not starry-eyed boosterism.

Much of this sounds like a Labour party press release. That may help explain why Truss is on course to win, not Sunak, but it also shows how damaging this leadership contest has been for the reputation of the Conservative Party as a whole. The candidates wrote scripts for Labour's next campaign adverts.

This row is likely to continue through the day. Brandon Lewis, the former Northern Ireland secretary, has been giving interviews this morning on behalf of Truss, and Oliver Dowden, the former Tory co-chair, has been doing the same for Sunak. I will summarise what they have been saying.

There is not much in the diary today, but Truss and Sunak are both holding campaign events with Tory members, and Downing Street is holding a lobby briefing at 11.30 am.

I try to monitor the comments below the BTL line but it is impossible to read all of them. If you have a direct question, include Andrew somewhere and I'm more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line ATL, although I can't promise to do this for everyone.

If you want to draw my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter.