Liz Truss has claimed that she would have done better than Rishi Sunak at the general election if she had still been Conservative leader.
Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister said she would have performed better than her successor because Reform UK was polling lower when she was in office.
Truss nearly crashed the economy during her short stint as Prime Minister and was forced to resign after just seven weeks in the job.
Her brief time in office saw a catastrophic mini budget of unfunded tax cuts for the rich that sent the markets into turmoil.
Experts say the budget proposals, which were abandoned after an outcry, worsened the cost of living crisis by sending interest rates and inflation skyrocketing.
Truss became PM after defeating Sunak in a leadership contest called after Boris Johnson quit in 2022.
The Tories were reduced to 121 seats at the July 4 election. Truss was speaking at an event at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham.
Asked if she would have performed better than Sunak at the election, Truss said: “Yes I do.”
“When I was in No 10, Reform was polling at three per cent. By the time we got to the election, I mean they got 18 per cent because we promised change that we didn’t deliver.
She continued: “Now, of course without the support of the parliamentary party it was very, very difficult for me to get my changes through. And if you have people in the parliamentary party saying ‘this is Liz Truss’s fault this has happened’… it is very difficult for me to deliver that change.”
Truss also said she wasn’t convinced by the current Tory leadership candidates: “So far, I haven’t seen any of the candidates really acknowledge how bad things are in the country as a whole, and frankly, for the Conservative Party.”
“They think ‘all we need to do is show competence and we will be ushered back into office’,” Truss said, adding: “They have to explain what went wrong, why things are so bad for the Conservatives and what they’re actually going to do.”
To sign up to the Daily Record Politics newsletter, click here