The Conservative Party “will never” risk economic stability with unfunded tax cuts like those in Liz Truss’ mini-budget, the shadow chancellor declared in a speech this morning.
The address, delivered by Mel Stride, marks the clearest repudiation yet of the failed former prime minister, by the party that elected her leader in 2022. “For a few weeks, we put at risk the very stability which Conservatives had always said must be carefully protected”, the shadow chancellor conceded.
“Mistakes were recognised and stability restored within weeks, with the full backing of our party. But the damage to our credibility is not so easily undone. That will take time. And it also requires contrition. So let me be clear: never again will the Conservative Party undermine fiscal credibility by making promises we cannot afford…
“The mini-budget of September 2022 undermined those stable foundations we had built, and we will never allow that to happen again.”
The spectre of Liz Truss has haunted the Conservative Party for years since her stunning defenestration in the autumn of 2022. Her defeat at the hands of a bewigged leaf vegetable features centrally in Westminster folklore — and the broader narrative of Conservative decline.
Indeed, Keir Starmer repeatedly referenced Truss at PMQs on Wednesday. In response to a question from backbencher Lincoln Jopp, the prime minister noted the member had succeeded former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng as the Tory MP for Spelthorne. “Now he stands there to give lectures on economic prudence”, Starmer added. “You couldn’t script it!”
Rishi Sunak spent the vast majority of his premiership refusing to directly rebuke the actions of his predecessor (and adversary during the first Tory leadership election of 2022). Contemporary commentators condemned Sunak’s conscious silence as a strategic misstep. It meant the former prime minister faced no resistance as she attempted to rehabilitate her image — via a series of stinging commons interventions, “alternative budgets” and even a manifesto-cum-memoir titled Ten Years to Save the West.
But Truss’ publicity blitz could not save her political career, and she was booted from parliament at the 2024 general election.
At the same time, the political and economic legacy of her mini-budget exacted an immense electoral toll on the Conservative Party nationally. In seat after seat, mortgage holders took revenge against whatever Tory incumbent stood before them.
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Mel Stride’s intervention today is somewhat belated, then. The Conservative leadership has finally decided to distance the party from the disaster it oversaw over two years ago.
That said, of all the 121 Tory MPs currently in parliament, Stride is surely best-placed to exorcise the spectre of Trussonomics — and not only on account of his role as shadow chancellor.
Stride served as the chair of the influential Treasury select committee during Truss’ brief tenure in Downing Street. Throughout that period, he emerged as a prominent and pretty relentless critic of her fiscal policies.
In his capacity of Treasury committee chair, a post he held from 2019-2022, Stride was one of the first Tory MPs to call for Truss to U-turn on her mini-budget measures. He was a regular media performer across this period, and his competent criticism will have motivated fellow Tories to follow in his stead. (He was also a close ally of Rishi Sunak, it should be noted).
The big problem for Kemi Badenoch is that Stride’s criticism of Truss was not echoed by many of those MPs who now serve on the Conservative frontbench.
Rather, several senior shadow ministers were themselves complicit in the Trussonomics experiment.
Speaking in the House of Commons on 12 October 2022, Stride insisted on a further “rowing back on the tax announcements” announced at the mini-budget. He asked the minister on duty to “confirm that that possibility is still on the table.”
Answering for the government was the chief secretary to the Treasury. “There are no plans to reverse any of the tax measures announced in the growth plan”, Chris Philp responded. (The minister was demoted two days later to make way for further reversals).
Philp now serves, alongside Stride, as the shadow home secretary. In fact, he is one of Badenoch’s most prominent frontbenchers, reflecting his brief and media presence.
And Philp is far from the only senior Tory implicated in the Truss experiment.
Wendy Morton, a shadow Foreign Office minister, served as chief whip under Truss — in which capacity she famously resigned and un-resigned.
Andrew Griffith, the shadow business and trade secretary, served as the financial secretary to the Treasury no less — placing him on the fiscal frontline with Philp.
Alongside Philp and Griffith, Richard Fuller, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, served as economic secretary to the Treasury under Truss.
And then there’s Kemi Badenoch, who served in the Truss ministry as trade secretary.
These facts have not been lost on Labour. As a party press release released this morning notes, Badenoch described Truss as a “maverick who gets things done” during the 2022 Tory leadership contest. In November 2022, some weeks after Truss’ downfall, Badenoch told the Washington Post that “what went wrong” with the mini-budget “was not necessarily with the package but in how it was sold.”
She added: “We didn’t bring people along with us. What Liz was trying to do was stimulate growth very quickly, to try and sort of re-boost the economy, but what people heard, unfortunately, wasn’t that. What they heard was tax cuts, money for the rich. And that wasn’t what she was trying to do, but unfortunately, that’s how it came across.”
Philp, the second most senior minister at Treasury under Truss (after Kwarteng), rated the mini-budget as a “9.5 out of 10”.
The Labour Party notes curtly: “Kemi has appointed every member of Truss’ Treasury team, who did not lose their seat in the general election, to her shadow cabinet”.
By this, the party is referring to Philp, Griffith, Fuller — and also to Edward Argar (the shadow health secretary), who replaced Philp as chief secretary to the Treasury once Truss began her hopeless U-turn era.
Labour is trying to make a simple point: Liz Truss, and the damage she wreaked, was not an accident.
In the 2000s, Truss was placed on David Cameron’s “A-list” of Conservative candidates; she was propelled through the Tory ranks as a “rising star”; she served under all PMs across the 2010-2024 period except Rishi Sunak; she was endorsed by several senior colleagues during the 2022 leadership contest; she won the all-important membership vote; her administration, as we have established, was bustling with Tory “big beasts”; and she was endorsed as a Tory candidate at the 2024 election.
As former Conservative MP Charles Walker put it in an interview with the BBC on 19 October 2022: “This whole affair… is a pitiful reflection on the Conservative parliamentary party at every level and it reflects really badly obviously on the government of the day…
“And do you know, I really shouldn’t say this but I hope all those people that put Liz Truss in No 10, I hope it was worth it, I hope it was worth it for the ministerial red box, I hope it was worth it to sit around the cabinet table because the damage they have done to our party is extraordinary.”
Himself a former “A-lister”, Mel Stride may well be the man to lead the Conservative Party’s belated pivot against Truss. But his position of political credibility, born of his principled criticism of the mini-budget, is almost certainly undermined by his colleagues’ incredibility.
If Badenoch is creeping tentatively to some form of “Clause IV moment” she will need to go further.
At the very least, the requisite apology cannot only come from the man who was right all along.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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