Rightwing papers backpedal after helping Liz Truss reach No 10

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Liz Truss’s hopes of becoming prime minister looked thin in early July. The then-foreign secretary was running a distant third in the Conservative leadership election, with Rishi Sunak and a surging Penny Mordaunt on track to make the final ballot that would be sent to Tory party members.

Supporters of Boris Johnson were not happy. They believed this outcome would pave the way for the coronation of Sunak, the same man who had dethroned Johnson by resigning as chancellor. Interested parties included Paul Dacre, the former Daily Mail editor who had been promised a peerage by Johnson, which he is still hoping to secure.

At this point, the Daily Mail unleashed weeks of pro-Truss stories, puff-piece interviews, and attacks on her rivals. When Truss finished a distant third in the first round of voting, the newspaper thundered that the “Tory right” needed to unite or let “establishment favourite Rishi Sunak” into No 10.

One Daily Mail splash published on 20 July – “Truss allies warn: No Dirty Backroom Deals” – appeared to be a direct instruction to Tory MPs voting for the final two candidates, rather than a story aimed at the hundreds of thousands of people who were buying the newspaper.

If just five Tory MPs had switched their votes then Truss would never have made the final leadership ballot that went to party members, she would never have entered Downing Street, and she would have never have attempted the expensive economic shock therapy that defined the 44 days until her resignation.

Although the influence of the outlets can be overstated, it is not impossible that the weeks of pro-Truss messaging by the Daily Mail swung the five votes that Truss required.

The Daily Telegraph also enthusiastically backed Truss, declaring she was the “competent and proficient” candidate who is “ready to assume the highest political office in the land”.

The Daily Express went further, saying: “Thanks partly to her long involvement with centre-right thinktanks, no one at the top of her party has a better understanding of policy development, or a deeper knowledge of the British state and its failings.”

What has perhaps been more extraordinary to watch is the backpedalling at those titles. Less than a month ago, the Daily Mail ran the front page “At Last! A True Tory budget” to celebrate the now-abandoned tax cut policies.

Allister Heath, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, went further and declared Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget to be a “moment in history that will radically transform Britain”.

“The neo-Brownite consensus of the past 20 years, the egalitarian, redistributionist obsession, the technocratic centrism, the genuflections at the altar of a bogus class war, the spreadsheet-wielding socialists: all were blown to smithereens by Kwarteng’s stunning neo-Reaganite peroration,” he wrote.

But as the impact of mortgage rate rises on their readers became apparent – and Truss tanked in the polls – the newspapers began to change tack. It remains to be seen whether they will acknowledge any role in creating the situation.

One powerful newspaper group was much more circumspect. Rupert Murdoch’s News UK likes to back political winners and had a rare misstep in this summer’s Tory leadership race when the Times endorsed Rishi Sunak and the Sun chose not to back either candidate. Those calls now look smarter.

Yet perhaps it is appropriate that during the farce of the shortest prime ministerial administration in British history an unlikely newspaper emerged with its reputation greatly enhanced. That was the Daily Star, the tabloid that attracted global media attention after starting a live stream testing whether an iceberg lettuce bought from Tesco would last longer than Liz Truss.

Tens of thousands of people were watching the stream on Thursday afternoon at the moment that Truss resigned in Downing Street. The Daily Star played the national anthem and viewers celebrated as a decaying, greying lettuce dressed in a wig was declared victorious over the prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.