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Liz Truss secretly mocked Rishi Sunak as “Russhi Sunak”, accusing him of not doing enough to oppose Vladimir Putin over the war on Ukraine.
New details of her alleged “intense personal dislike” of Mr Sunak are disclosed in a new book, Truss at 10, by Sir Anthony Seldon.
According to Sir Anthony, Ms Truss believed Mr Sunak was guilty of “screwing” her, with “vicious attacks” on her by his team, before she defeated him to become prime minister.
The author describes how Ms Truss exacted petty revenge on Mr Sunak in her moment of triumph at a Conservative rally in September 2022.
She ordered shocked aides to remove all references to her defeated rival – a longstanding customary act of courtesy – from her victory speech, says Sir Anthony.
In the event, Mr Sunak later succeeded Ms Truss in Downing Street, when she was forced to resign after 49 days following an economic crash sparked by her policies.
Sir Anthony says there were tensions between the two while they were serving respectively as chancellor and foreign secretary in Boris Johnson’s government, over Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
He says Mr Sunak was “the person Truss disliked most” among the seven senior Tories who lined up against her in the 2022 Conservative leadership campaign: “She thought he and the Treasury were dragging their feet over sanctions on those who fuelled the Russian war machine, and she called him ‘Russhi Sunak’ behind his back.”
It was not Ms Truss’s only unflattering nickname for her cabinet colleagues: Sir Anthony says her moniker for Michael Gove was “that snake”.
The author also says that Ms Truss blocked moves by her allies to “reach out” to Mr Sunak’s supporters in the leadership contest, “not least because she considered Sunak’s team to have been so vicious.
“She regarded Rishi as screwing her in the campaign, alongside his team, and she was seething,” said one of those on her side.
Sir Anthony says Ms Truss showed a “lack of empathy” when she snubbed Mr Sunak in her acceptance speech after she defeated him to become prime minister.
“There was no handshake or word of consolation to her competitor.”
Sir Anthony says that Ms Truss’s speechwriter, Asa Bennett, told him in an interview for the book that she had ordered him to delete all mention of Mr Sunak in her acceptance speech and to praise the disgraced outgoing prime minister Mr Johnson instead.
The book states: “When preparing her acceptance speech, she had turned to her speechwriter [Bennett] to ask, ‘Can we have a bit more about Boris and a bit less about Rishi?’ The surprised aide, who had been following precedent in including something positive about the person who had been defeated, asked, ‘How much about Rishi?’
“‘How about nothing about Rishi,’ she replied curtly. ‘As you will,’ he said.”
Ms Truss “decided to rewrite the speech herself”, notes Sir Anthony.
