Senior allies of Tory leadership contender Liz Truss have accused her rival Rishi Sunak of having “dug his heels in” as chancellor to resist efforts to cut red tape after Brexit.
In a brutal attack on their former colleague, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng and chief secretary to the Treasury Simon Clarke also claimed Mr Sunak wanted to “normalise” a 70-year high tax burden.
“Rishi has given up,” they said. “He wants people to fear there is no alternative to sliding into recession and that the only option is to stem the bleeding with Labour-lite economic policy.”
In their joint article in The Telegraph, they claimed: “He talks about cutting EU regulations, yet he dug his heels in as chancellor against efforts to do exactly that and realise the benefits of Brexit”.
Mr Clarke, who worked under the former chancellor, and Mr Kwarteng, added: “We both saw it in Cabinet, including resisting reforms to the EU’s Solvency II regulation – making it harder for pension funds and investors to invest in British business – and being backward-leaning on moving ahead with legislation to fix issues with the Northern Ireland Protocol.”
A campaign source in Mr Sunak’s team, however, told the newspaper it was “categorically wrong” that he resisted reforms to Solvency II and had backed the hardline approach to Brussels.
A spokesperson for the former chancellor also told The Independent: “Rishi was one of the few ministers who delivered real Brexit reforms as chancellor.”
“From establishing eight freeports to ripping up the EU rulebook when it came to financial services, he delivered a proper plan for reform and change,” they added.
During the campaign Mr Sunak has also promised that he will “have scrapped or reformed all of the EU law, red tape and bureaucracy” by the time of the next election — vowing to to conduct a review of all retained rules within 100 days of taking office.
Despite calls from some quarters to tone down the blue-on-blue attacks, both sides have traded increasingly bitter blows in recent days, with Mr Kwarteng and Mr Clarke’s article being the latest incident.
Last night, Mr Sunak’s team also accused Ms Truss of “a major U-turn on the biggest issue currently facing the country” earlier in the day, when she backed away from her earlier refusal to consider “handouts” for those unable to pay their gas and electricity bills.
Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng with Tory leadership contender Liz Truss
A Sunak aide said: “It’s all very well offering empty words about ‘doing all you can’, but there aren’t lots of different ways to act on this. Taking action means providing direct support, which Truss had previously dismissed as ‘handouts’.
“Twice now, Truss has made a serious moral and political misjudgement on a policy affecting millions of people, after last week reversing plans to cut the pay of teachers and the armed forces outside London. Mistakes like this in government would cost the Conservative Party the next general election.”
But a Truss team spokesperson retorted: “Rishi Sunak wouldn’t know how people benefit from a tax cut because he has never cut a tax in his life.
“People didn’t vote for the Conservative Party to be subjected to old-fashioned Gordon Brown style politics of envy.”
