- Rishi Sunak refuses to commit to voting for Truss’s emergency budget if she wins Tory leadership – UK politics live The Guardian
- Who won the Tory hustings on Times Radio? Our writers' verdicts The Times
- Truss attacks ‘Treasury orthodoxy’ as she promotes tax-cutting leadership pitch The Independent
- Liz Truss will need the Treasury when she faces economic reality | John Rentoul The Independent
- Editorial: Liz Truss's boosterish case for tax cuts doesn't stand up to scrutiny The Independent
- View Full coverage on Google News
The rightwing Conservative MP John Redwood has welcomed Liz Truss’s refusal to commit to appointing a new ethics adviser for No 10 if she becomes prime minister.
Good news that Liz Truss does not want to appoint an Ethics Adviser. She will judge right and wrong with the whole country watching. There will be other posts she can do without in government.
— John Redwood (@johnredwood) August 24, 2022
Redwood was Welsh secretary under John Major, but he has not served in government since 1995 and he last sat on the Conservative frontbench in 2005. But he has been tipped for a ministerial job if Truss becomes PM.
Gavin Barwell, who was chief of staff for Theresa May when she was PM, says that, even if Truss can tell the difference between right and wrong herself, she will find it useful having an independent ethics adviser.
She will discover that when you have to sack one of your ministers - possibly a close friend - it is actually helpful to a prime minister to have an independent figure confirm that they have broken the ministerial code, rather than that having to be your judgement alone https://t.co/NR43RuoMLV
— Gavin Barwell (@GavinBarwell) August 24, 2022
Sunak says freezing energy price cap would require too much government borrowing
And here is a full summary of the main lines from Rishi Sunak’s interview with the Today programme.
Sunak refused to commit to voting for Liz Truss’s emergency budget if she becomes prime minister.
See 9.04am.
He defended his decision not to back plans to freeze the energy price cap at the current level - saying this would require too much government borrowing. Labour and the Liberal Democrats are proposing an energy price cap freeze, and many energy companies also want to see the energy price cap frozen at the current level, alongside a mechanism being put in place to compensate them for the income they would lose. Sunak said that the energy companies had not spoken to him directly about their plan. (He seemed to be referring to the Scottish Power proposal for a £100bn rescue plan.) But he said this would involve too much borrowing. He said:
- This is a challenge that is going to be with us for some time. And in that context, we need to make sure that what we’re doing is not only affordable, but also isn’t going to make inflation worse.
And at a time when we’re already borrowing an enormous amount of money, I think embarking on policies and programmes that add not just tens of billions, but tens and tens and tens and tens of billions of pounds on a permanent basis to our borrowing are risky, and that’s actually been a debate that we’ve had in this leadership race now.
I think that is a gamble with people’s savings, with their pensions, with mortgage rates, in making inflation become more embedded, and that won’t help anybody if that happens, because inflation makes everybody poor. It’s pernicious.
So, yes, I am nervous and sceptical about plans that are complacent about that risk.
He said plans that implied government did not need to make difficult choices were generally “too good to be true”. He made this point when he was specifically talking about the proposals to freeze the energy price cap, but he also made it clear that he thought some of Liz Truss’s plans came into this category.
See 9.04am.
He said that, in stressing the need for government to take difficult choices, he was following the lead set by Margaret Thatcher. He mentioned her when asked to name the conservative thinker who had influence him most. He said that people who had worked with her endorsed his approach to tackling inflation, not Truss’s. He went on:
One thing I admire and respect about [Thatcher] … is that she was prepared not just to say the easy things that people may have wanted to hear, she said the things that may have been difficult to hear but were right for the country, and had the courage of her convictions. And that’s a standard that I hold myself to.
He refused to accept that Labour’s plan to freeze the energy price cap for the winter was fully costed. He said the proposal had been “wildly criticised for [the] credibility of that costing”. Sunak was referring in particular to Labour’s claim that £7bn to pay for the plan would come from lower government debt interest payments.
He implied that he was in favour of the government telling people to use less energy this winter. Asked if the government should be doing this, as other governments are in Europe, Sunak replied:
- We have to look at all options available for us, and there are things that the builders and plumbing association have mentioned which I thought were quite sensible, about changing flow rates on boilers, which I didn’t know about which can help reduce energy usage without people seeing any real impact on how they consume energy. So we should be looking at all of these things.
Also I would embark on a programme of massive energy efficiency upgrades in people’s homes.
Rajan asked this question because the current government, and the Truss campaign, are resisting the idea that people should be asked to cut their energy use. This position has been fiercely criticised, for example by the FT columnist Sarah Connor.
Rishi Sunak refuses to commit to voting for Truss’s emergency budget if she wins Tory leadership
Good morning. Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor who will only beat Liz Truss in the Tory leadership contest if multiple polls turn out to be completely wrong, has been giving an interview to the Today programme this morning. He has been accepting plenty of interviews recently, which may partly be related to the fact that he is a confident media peformer, but probably says more about the fact that, as the underdog in the contest, he has nothing to lose. In contrast, Truss has repeatedly refused invitations to setpiece media interviews.
Speaking to Amol Rajan, the Today presenter, Sunak refused to commit to voting for Truss’s proposed emergency budget in September if she wins. He has already indicated that he would not take a job in her cabinet because he disagrees so strongly with her plan to reverse the national insurance increase that he implemented as chancellor. (He sees it as an unfunded tax cut that would push up inflation and disproportionately benefit the rich.) At the Tory hustings last night in Birmingham Sunak dodged a question about whether he would vote for Truss’s plan if she won. Rajan tried again, and he told Sunak people would like to know whether he would vote against Truss’s planned emergency budget. Again, Sunak would not give an answer. He replied:
I’m not going to engage in these things partly because acting like this race is not over isn’t right.
But elsewhere in the interview he restated his claim that Truss’s tax proposals were essentially implausible. He said:
Governing is hard. Governing involves choices, it involves difficult trade offs.
Plans, whether they come from my opponent, or indeed the energy companies or anyone else, who seem to suggest that you can have absolutely everything you want, and you don’t have to make a difficult choice – that you can have lots of tax cuts, you can help people with the cost of living, borrowing doesn’t matter, inflation will take care of itself – if that all sounds a bit too good to be true, I think most people listening will think most things, when they do sound too good to be true, they probably are.
I will post more from the interview shortly. My colleague Gemma McSherry covered the hustings in Birmingham on the blog last night. You can read her coverage here.
Otherwise it looks relatively quiet today, but here are three things in the diary.
9.30am: The ONS publishs a report on the impact of sanctions on UK trade with Russia.
10am: Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, joined Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, in Glasgow at an event to discuss Labour palns to empower commmunities.
12pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, takes part in an “In Conversation” at the Edinburgh fringe.
I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it 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.
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