Liz Truss Claims She Would Have Performed Better Than Rishi Sunak At The Election

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss has claimed she would have performed better at the general election than Rishi Sunak.

At Conservative Party conference, the former prime minister was in conversation with The Telegraph in front of a packed out 300-seater hall. Asked if she would have performed better than Sunak on 4 July when the Tories were reduced to 121 seats, Truss said “Yes I do.”

“When I was in No 10, Reform was polling at three per cent,” she said. By the time we got to the election, I mean they got 18 per cent because we promised change that we didn’t deliver.

She went on: “Now, of course without the support of the parliamentary party it was very, very difficult for me to get my changes through. And if you have people in the parliamentary party saying ‘this is Liz Truss’s fault this has happened’... it is very difficult for me to deliver that change.”

Truss is the United Kingdom’s shortest-serving prime minister after serving 49 days in Downing Street. However, polls showed just 19 per cent  of voters were set to vote Tory shortly before she stepped down as party leader, which was lower than the party's rating when the 2024 election was called.

The Tories suffered their worst defeat in 200 years after having had three prime ministers within five years. The party’s vote share fell by more than 20 per cent across the country.

Asked whether she was impressed with any of the four candidates so far, Truss said she was not particularly enthused by the remaining contenders.

“So far, I haven’t really seen any of the candidates acknowledge how bad things are in the country as a whole and frankly for the Conservative Party,” she said.

“They have to explain what went wrong, why things are so bad for the Conservatives and what they’re