Tory MPs will hold up to three rounds of voting this week to narrow the field down to two, leaving grassroots members to make the final choice by September 5. Truss has announced unfunded tax cuts of up to £30bn, pitting frontrunner Rishi Sunak, who has said she wants to tackle inflation before cutting taxes. Raab, a Sunak supporter, said on Sunday: “Liz can answer for her policies and her track record. he was general secretary of the Ministry of Finance. People can see whether spending and the number of employees in the public administration has increased or decreased.” “Did he cut taxes at that time?” he added, speaking to Sophy Ridge on Sky News. Truss was chief secretary to the exchequer between 2017 and 2019. The role includes overseeing the government’s spending plans, although the wider direction would have been set by the then chancellor, Philip Hammond. Truss said this weekend she would abandon “Stalinist” housing targets in favor of using tax and other incentives in “opportunity zones” to encourage developers to build homes. “The best way to create economic growth is from the bottom up, creating these incentives for investment through the tax system, simplifying regulations,” he told the Sunday Telegraph. But taxes and spending have been the key battleground in the contest, with most candidates promising tax cuts while Sunak positions himself as the guardian of fiscal responsibility. He has repeatedly said that he will not tell his colleagues “tales” about what is possible. Raab sent this message on Sunday. “Sanely conservative economics means you reduce inflation. If not, any money delivered to their bank accounts through tax cuts will be robbed back, due to inflation or interest and mortgage payments. This cannot be right,” he said. In a bid to appeal to Brexiters, Sunak this weekend promised to review all EU law kept on the statute book until the next general election and cut red tape. ‘We haven’t exactly been covered in glory’: Tory leadership debate – video highlights “We need to seize these opportunities by shedding the mass of unnecessary regulations and the low-growth mentality we have inherited from the EU,” he told the Sunday Telegraph. Penny Mordaunt, who came second in the first two rounds of voting among Tory MPs, appeared to suggest she would relax Sunak’s budget rules to afford the tax cuts he is promising – halving fuel tax and increasing of personal taxation limits. Asked about the two rules in place – that debt should be reduced as a percentage of GDP in three years and that the government should only borrow to invest – Mordaunt said: “I said I would do the former.” He added: “This is not about rewriting an entire manifesto. All of us stood on a manifesto which we have not yet issued. And we also haven’t delivered the 2016 referendum yet.” Abolishing the second fiscal rule would entail a more relaxed approach to public spending than that adopted by Labor under Jeremy Corbyn. Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Morning, Mordaunt also hit out at the pageant’s “taints” and “toxic politics” as she sought to counter claims she had been misleading about her stance on trans rights. “This is the type of toxic politics that people want to get away from: poor Britons have months to go,” he said, adding: “There’s a series of smears being made in the papers. My colleagues are very angry and upset that this is how the leadership contest is being dragged out.” Documents leaked to the Sunday Times suggest Mordaunt was prepared to remove some, though not all, of the medical requirements for people who choose to change sex. Her successor as equality minister, Kemi Badenoch, who is also running for the leadership, said Mordant’s stance in the past had been to push for self-determination. This contrasts with Mordaunt’s insistence on Friday’s Channel 4 debate that she was “never in favor of self-identification”. Badenoch told the Sunday Times: “I’m not going to call her a liar, I think it’s quite possible she didn’t really understand what she was signing. It’s a very complicated area.” Tom Tugendhat, who came fifth in Thursday’s round of voting, insisted he had the experience to become prime minister despite not having served in a cabinet. and described Boris Johnson’s account of events in Downing Street during Partygate as “rather more fiction than fact”.
