Tory Leadership Favourite Truss Woos MPs Still Backing Sunak

Tory leadership favourite Liz Truss has an overwhelming lead in polls of party members and has already won the backing of several runners-up from the early stages of the contest to replace Boris Johnsons as Prime Minister.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is hoping to win over MPs who backed her rival Rishi Sunak in the ongoing Tory leadership race.

The Guardian's political correspondent reported that the Truss campaign was seeking to put the final nail in Sunak's political coffin by flipping his majority support on the government benches.

A source in the Sunak campaign accused Truss of "desperately" bidding to seduce his supporters into defecting. "That’s the only way she’ll keep momentum up, and it’ll be toxic for us,” the source complained. "It is sucking momentum."

"If anybody does switch, it won’t be because they’ve changed their mind, it’ll be because they’ve lost their nerve and got in a flap," another anonymous source told the liberal newspaper.

Truss already leads the former chancellor of the exchequer, who led the palace coup against Prime Minister Boris Johnson last month, by a ratio of more than two to one in recent polls of Conservative Party members.

Truss got a major boost at the party hustings in the Devon city of Exeter on Monday when Trade Policy Minister Penny Mordaunt, who came a close third to Truss in the rounds of MPs' votes before the ballot of up to 200,000 party members, gave the right-winger her backing.

Truss had been blamed for attacks on Mordaunt claiming she was too 'woke' on issues like gender identity after the Portsmouth North MP insisted in Parliament that "trans men are men and trans women are women" earlier this year.

Truss has also won the support of another eliminated hopeful Tom Tugendhat, who painted himself as a 'one nation' candidate on the left of the party despite his opposition to Brexit — an unpopular position in the 50 northern former 'Red Wall' seats the party won in the 2019 election.

Truss also took the Remain side in the 2016 election, but has since turned belligerent to Brussels over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Bothe she and Tugendhat are among the most strident Conservative voices for military support for the Kiev regime of Volodymyr Zelensky against Russia.

But the foreign secretary has yet to win the backing of Kemi Badenoch, the fourth-placed runner on the traditional Conservative wing of the party whose campaign was run by Levelling-Up Secretary Michael Gove, a party heavyweight.

A source in the Truss camp warned that if Badenoch did not "go over the top, it might determine [whether] she gets a job in the cabinet" — pointing out that her public backers were doing the hard work of defending Truss to journalists. "You’d be aggrieved if someone who couldn’t be bothered got parachuted right to the top," the source said.

Tempers flared between two of the candidates' big-name backers before Thursday evening's 'debate' — actually separate interviews with the candidates in front of a studio audience — on Sky News.

Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, on the Truss bus, told Justice Secretary and deputy PM Dominic Raab, in team Sunak, to stop interrupting him as he tried to answer a reporter's question.

"Please give me time".

It's all getting heated 🔥 before the #BattleForNo10 programme, with Rishi Sunak supporter, Dominic Raab, and Liz Truss supporter, Kwasi Kwarteng, clashing on their respective candidates' tax plans 👀https://t.co/ZTbv6x8cal

📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602 pic.twitter.com/jQpq6VIqG0

— Sky News (@SkyNews) August 4, 2022

And political gossip site Guido Fawkes pointed out that one audience member hostile to Truss was in fact Tom Harding, once chief of staff to Anna Soubry, the former Tory MP for Broxtowe who defected to the short-lived 'Independent Group for Change' party in 2019 in a failed bid to block Britain's exit from the EU.

Harding attacked Truss over her swift U-turn on a pledge to cut government spending by setting up regional public sector pay boards — after Sunak's side pointed out it would mean cutting the wages of nurses, police officers and soldiers by around £1,500 a year.

Another anti-Truss plant was Jill Andrew, a lawyer who previously worked at Conservative Central HQ and lost out to Johnson for selection as the party's candidate for the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat in 1997.