“It’s Terry Or Truss” — Labour MP Who Unseated Liz Truss Reveals How He Beat Ex-PM

The Labour MP who overturned Liz Truss’ huge majority to oust the former prime minister on 4 July said he ran on the slogan; look, it's Liz Truss.

Terry Jermy, the MP for South West Norfolk, said a crowd-funding campaign paid for thousands of leaflets saying the race to win was “Terry or Truss”, helping him achieve the biggest swing from Conservative to Labour ever recorded in a general election.

His victory was the most surprising of a number of high-profile defeats for senior Tory figures last month, with more than a dozen Cabinet ministers losing their seats in what was the worst ever general election defeat for the Conservatives.

Penny Mordaunt, Gillian Keegan and Grant Shapps, who were senior figures in the previous Tory administration, all lost their seats as the Conservatives bled support to Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK.

The outcome in the formerly safe Tory constituency was one of the last to be announced as Keir Starmer's Labour swept to victory.

Speaking to The Rundown podcast from PoliticsHome this week, however, Jermy said he spent the hours leading up to the declaration expecting Truss to end up in third place.

“For most of the night, Truss was third. I thought the story was going to be former prime minister loses her seat and comes third, and it's total humiliation,” he told this week's episode of the podcast.

“Reform were second, and I thought it'd be between me and Reform.”

But he said as the night wore on Truss started to do much better, moving into second place, adding: “And I thought, well, maybe the rest of the night will be positive for her, and she goes up into first place, and don't get carried away with yourself. 

“I thought we'd win by 700, at the end of it we won by 630 so we weren’t too