Good morning. This is the third Tory leadership contest in six years taking place while the party is in government, but in 2016 and 2019 the elections were both dominated by the single issue of Brexit. This is not the case this time, and one consequence of that is that Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – the two candidates still in the race – are having, or choosing, to say a lot more about policy in a range of areas.
And they are at it again this morning, with both making announcements.
Truss, who is now seen as the clear frontrunner in the contest, has promised a return to national crime targets, pledging a 20% reduction in murders, other violence and burglaries within two years. My colleagues Peter Walker and Vikram Dodd have the details here.
In response, the Sunak campaign described this as “a lightweight plan based on publishing data the government already does and a power grab away from police and crime commissioners, including many excellent Conservative PCCs driving down crime in their area”.
Sunak has promised to scrap VAT on household fuel bills next year, saving the average household ?160. As chancellor he resisted calls to cut VAT on fuel, arguing that this would disproprotionately help wealthy families paying to heat large homes, but he says he favours the move now because the energy price cap is expected to rise above ?3,000 in October. The proposal is part of what Sunak calls his “winter plan” and my colleague Heather Stewart has the details.
The Truss campaign has described this as a “screeching U-turn”. A Truss campaign source told the Telegraph:
It’s good that Rishi has finally woken up and decided to offer something to people struggling with the rising cost of living. However, this feels like a screeching U-turn from someone who has spent the last few weeks of the leadership campaign branding everyone else’s tax cuts immoral and fairytales.
Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury and a leading Truss supporter, has made much the same point on Twitter.
Perhaps what is most interesting about the Sunak announcement is what it says about how Sunak thinks his campaign is faring.
As chancellor he always said he was willing to do more to help people with heating bills in the winter. But his last pacakge of measures was largely focused on measures targeted at low-income households; a VAT cut would help everyone, including richer people who need the money much less, which was why Sunak used to argue it was a bad idea. But many of the people voting in the Conservative leadership contest are in this category.
So Sunak is retreating from the preference for targeted intervention that he championed as chancellor. He also risks undermining his main argument against Truss, which is that she has been promising unfunded tax cuts. That is the sort of move you might expect from a campaign in trouble (which is what the polling suggests) calculating that it needs to do something drastic to regain the initiative.
There is not much in the political diary for the day, but campaigning never stops, so we will find something to blog about.
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