From energy bills to Brexit: a guide to the Tory leadership race U-turns

Party leadership races often involve candidates adjusting policies on the hoof, and so tend to have more than the usual share of U-turns. . Here are some highlights.

Liz Truss

Public sector pay
Late on Monday last week, Truss announced a plan to save £11bn a year with a “war on Whitehall waste”, £8.8bn of which would come from “tailoring” public sector pay to where people work – that is, cutting it for people outside London and the south-east of England.

After a torrent of criticism, including from Ben Houchen, the Tory mayor of Tees Valley, Truss dropped the policy little more than 12 hours after it was announced. A statement from her campaign falsely said there had been “wilful misrepresentation” of the plan, even though the original press release made it clear that savings would come from creating regional pay scales for all public sector workers, including police, teachers and the like.

Help with energy bills
Another “clarification” came a few days later, when in an interview with the Financial Times, Truss appeared to rule out any further assistance for people to pay soaring energy bills this winter beyond tax cuts, which disproportionately help the better off.

Truss said: “Of course I will look at what more can be done. But the way I would do things is in a Conservative way of lowering the tax burden, not giving out handouts.” After criticism from Rishi Sunak’s campaign, Truss supporter Penny Mordaunt took to the airwaves to say other forms of assistance remained possible. Truss has since refused to say if she would offer more help.

Longer-term changes of view
All politicians adjust their opinions over time, but Truss is notable for the extent of her idealogical trajectory,in the short and longer terms. Until recently, Truss was an enthusiastic proponent of building new homes in the green belt, but is now more coy on the issue.

More generally, Truss began as a student Liberal Democrat who wanted to abolish the monarchy and more recently was an opponent of Brexit before the 2016 referendum. In the leadership race, she has presented herself as the PM to keep alive the flame of true Brexit.

Rishi Sunak

VAT on energy bills
The former chancellor’s primary pitch for No 10 has been as the voice of financial reality, in contrast to what his camp portrays as Truss’s have-cake-and-eat-it boosterism. But this has changed as the campaign has gone on.

Most notable was his idea to cut VAT on energy bills, saving the average household £160 a year. While this is a modest proposal given the expected rise in energy bills, allies of Truss gleefully described it as “a screeching handbrake U-turn”.

Gaming levelling up funds
This is less a U-turn than a confession. While speaking to Tory party members in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Sunak said that as chancellor he had managed to take money from deprived urban areas to give to other parts of the country.

In footage obtained by the New Statesman, Sunak said: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure areas like this are getting the funding they deserved.” Sunak’s allies said he had merely been re-stating the idea of also focusing on deprivation in towns and rural areas.

The war on woke
Sunak was never seen as much of a culture warrior by the standards of Boris Johnson’s cabinet, but appealing to Tory party members has seen him change his tune. In one speech at the end of last month, he pledged to battle “leftwing agitators” who sought to “take a bulldozer to our history, our traditions and our fundamental values”.

Separately, Sunak said he would extend the Prevent anti-extremism programme to people who sought to “vilify” Britain, described by one former senior police officer as an idea that risked “straying into thought crimes”.