“I can lead, I can make tough decisions and I can get things done,” he said at a carefully choreographed event in Westminster attended by the MP and cabinet supporters. “I am ready to be prime minister from day one.” In an apparent anonymous dig at Penny Mordaunt, who unexpectedly received more votes than Truss in the first round of MPs’ voting on Wednesday, the Foreign Secretary highlighted her experience in top-level positions. “I’ve been ready to hit the ground running since day one,” Truss said in a line repeated several times in her speech and press conference, and also used by Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, who introduced her. While she has long been seen as the front-runner to succeed Boris Johnson, Truss faces a major battle to make the final two candidates chosen by rounds of voting among Tory MPs. The leader will then be decided by the party members. In the first round, Truss came a relatively distant third with 50 votes, behind former chancellor Rishi Sunak, on 88, and Penny Mordaunt, junior trade secretary, on 67. Truss has cast herself as Margaret Thatcher’s economic heir and, answering questions after her speech, insisted she had argued to the cabinet against the recent increase in national insurance to pay for social care reform. Asked why, unlike Sunak, he had not resigned from the Johnson government, Truss said: “I’m a loyal man. I am loyal to Boris Johnson. I supported the ambitions of our Prime Minister and I want to fulfill the promise of the 2019 manifesto.” Truss stressed her commitment to Johnson’s flagship idea of leveling up, but set out a very different vision for it, based on low-tax, low-regulation zones, with no mention of the infrastructure spending currently planned. “Everyone should have the same opportunities, regardless of their background or where they live. And that’s the level of upside, conservatively,” Truss said. Billed by Kwarteng as a “true blue, conservative tax cut”, Truss presented her plan to finance the tax cuts by postponing the period in which the public debt built up during Covid is paid off. “Now is the time to be bold,” he said. “We cannot have economic management as usual, which has led to decades of low growth.” While she tries to decline an invitation to repeat Tory peer David Frost’s warnings on Thursday about Mordaunt’s responsibility – Truss said she would “not make any disparaging comments” about other candidates – her team will be aware of the threat to her campaign. by the former defense minister. Much of their hope will be in attracting MPs who currently support Suella Braverman, the attorney general, and former upgrade minister Kemi Badenoch, who are also on the party’s libertarian right, but are not expected to make it to the bottom two. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Braverman, who received 32 votes Wednesday, appears to be most at risk in Thursday’s runoff, when the last candidate is eliminated. In what could be the final step for wavering MPs, Braverman released a campaign video on Thursday morning in which she promised that, as prime minister, she would withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (EHRC). , allowing her to take strong action to deport migrants and asylum seekers from the UK. “I’m the only candidate who has promised that,” Braverman said, challenging others to join her. Such a move is seen as politically and legally fraught given the EHRC’s role in the deal that brought peace to Northern Ireland.
