Afternoon summary
A former Tory minister, Conor Burns, has said the Conservative party should ban Liz Truss from ever being a candidate again to show it understands the damage done by her mini-budget. (See 3.23pm.) Burns was speaking after Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, gave a speech disowning the mini-budget.
Stride told journalists that Kemi Badenoch will get better through time” at the media and at PMQs. (See 12.05pm.)
Jeremy Hunt, the former Tory chancellor, has said that he thinks Truss is deluded about the reasons for her downfall. In an interview with the News Agents podcast, he said:
There is this weird thing in politics where sometimes you persuade yourself to believe something that’s patently rubbish, because you just have to, because the psychological consequences of accepting.
Liz, as a free marketeer, can never accept that it was actually the markets that brought her down. And for her it has to be some fictitious plot by the establishment, the Bank of England. And the reality was the markets were not going to stomach those unfunded tax cuts and spending commitments. I think it’s often characterised as an issue of tax cuts, but it was actually the energy price guarantee that probably spooked the markets more than the tax cuts, because we were saying your energy bills will never be more than two grand. That’s a hell of a commitment in an environment where you think that energy prices are going to stay high for a long time …
And I think she finds that very, very difficult. So, she’s persuaded herself of all sorts of things that are just not true.
Asked if he thought the Conservative party should throw Truss out, Hunt said he was conflicted. He explained:
That is a decision for Kemi Badenoch. I feel slightly conflicted when asked that question, because she appointed me chancellor, and as I explain in the book, in the few days when she was prime minister, she had to do something quite courageous, which was to sit next to me in the House of Commons as I ripped up almost everything that she’d done as prime minister and everything she campaigned for, and she did so with significant courage.
I know it’s not fashionable to stick up for Liz Truss, but that cannot have been easy for her, so I am nervous about publicly criticising her, but it’s absolutely not helpful what she’s doing, and I don’t agree with it, and I think we do have to draw a line under the mistakes of that period, because they are being thrown at us week in, week out in parliament.
The government has named Mary-Ann Stephenson as its preferred candidate to be the next chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Stephenson, who runs the Women’s Budget Group, a feminist economics thinktank, and who has a PhD in equality law, would replace Kishwer Falkner, who is due to leave in November. Falkner, who was appointed by the Conservatives, has angered some Labour MPs by her stance on trans issues. In particular, she has been blamed the nature of the EHRC’s interim, non-binding guidance on how to implement the supreme court ruling saying references to “women” in the Equality Act just mean biological women. The guidance has been criticised as simplistic, and unnecessarily unhelpful to trans people.
For a full list of all the stories covered here today, scroll through the key events timeline at the top of the blog.
Updated
The Unite union has urged the government to reinstate the winter fuel payment immediately. In a statement Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, said:
Most people now recognise that the winter fuel cut was a massive mistake.
Unite has been calling on the government to scrap the cut from day one and I was pleased when the PM finally acknowledged this.
This government needs to learn that when you are in a hole, you should stop digging. You can’t leave pensioners in limbo while you work out plans for taxing the families of the deceased - just reverse it now.
We are the sixth richest economy in the world, and we need to stop picking the pockets of pensioners and bring in a wealth tax.
