Tory leadership – live: Liz Truss backed by Ben Wallace, as Labour poll lead soars

Liz Truss has vowed to “unlock” home ownership if she is made prime minister by helping renters prove they are ready to take on a mortgage.

Through an upcoming government review of the market, the foreign secretary claimed she would allow rent payments to be used as part of the affordability assessment for a mortgage – something the majority of lenders do not currently accept as proof of ability to pay a mortgage.

She is also planning to “rip up the red tape that is holding back house building” by “scrapping top down Whitehall-imposed housing targets”.

“Truss’s government will work with local communities to identify sites ripe for redevelopment and reduce planning restrictions – turbocharging commercial and residential development,” her campaign said.

Our political columnist Andrew Grice has a warning for Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss in his latest Independent Voices piece:

He writes:“We must never forget why Boris had to resign,” one former minister told me. Yet the Conservatives are already suffering from collective memory loss.

Their leadership election has a hole at its heart. There has been no acknowledgement of why it’s happening – Boris Johnson’s flouting of the rules and his lies. His giant shadow hung over the first hustings for Tory members in Leeds last night; repeated mentions of his name gathered applause from the 1,400 party members present.

Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak seem reluctant to talk about the elephant in the room – the need to restore standards, in order to prevent another prime minister from behaving like Johnson. My inbox is bulging with their policy commitments, but not on how they would clean up politics.

New YouGov polling of Tory members shows a huge proportion want Kemi Badenoch and Ben Wallace to be in the next prime minister’s Cabinet.

Those topping the list all made it to the final few rounds of voting by MPs in the contest to replace Boris Johnson.

Liz Truss said she is “not at all complacent” about her prospects in the Tory leadership contest.

Asked if she is confident she is now set to win the race, having secured defence secretary Ben Wallace’s support, she told reporters in Norfolk: “I’m not at all complacent. I’m fighting for every vote across the country.”

The foreign secretary added: “I’m the person who can get our economy growing, reduce taxes, but also unleash all of the opportunities of Brexit, and that’s what I’m determined to do.

“I’m delighted to have the support of Ben Wallace. We’ve worked very closely together. He’s been a fantastic Defence Secretary for our country.”

A self-described former “member of the Turnip Taliban”, who voted against Liz Truss becoming the Conservative candidate for the safe seat of South West Norfolk in 2009, said she has been an “excellent” MP and would do the job of prime minister well.

Local councillor Roy Brame was among the members of Ms Truss’s local Tory association who voted against her after she made it on to David Cameron’s A-list of priority candidates and was parachuted into the constituency.

The 67-year-old said he voted against her at the time because “she was not local” but conceded that she has been an “excellent MP for the area”. He said he has “not 10 per cent” decided if he will vote for Ms Truss or Rishi Sunak in the Conservative Party leadership election, but he praised Ms Truss.

Ms Truss’s candidacy narrowly survived the attempt by traditionalist members of the local association – nicknamed the “Turnip Taliban” over their conservative views and the local agricultural produce – to deselect her in 2009 after it emerged she had had an affair with married Conservative MP Mark Field.

With tens of thousands of CWU members striking for the first time in 35 years today, the union’s general secretary has hit out at Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer for banning shadow ministers from attending picket lines in solidarity with workers.

“The actions of the Labour leadership is disgraceful. We will have to deal with that,” Dave Ward told the Press Association news agency, after Sam Tarry appeared alongside workers in central London just two days after being sacked from Labour’s front bench.

“I think what will happen is that people will see through Labour unless they change their position because it seems to me that Labour want to win an election without any principles or any policies and people won’t accept that”.

He added: “Clearly Labour are in a position now that I think they’ve set out their path. It’s not the same path that we’re going down.”

Pointing to her history in government and as a young Lib Dem activist, a former Tory MP has suggested that Liz Truss views herself as a bold “outsider”

Writing in the New Statesman, David Gauke wrote of the foreign secretary: “She is by both temperament and conviction a rebel, an anti-establishment figure wary – even dismissive – of authority and received wisdom”.

Ms Truss views herself “as an outsider who is bolder and more ambitious than the risk-averse, defeatist, privileged, establishment men whom she finds so condescending”, said Mr Gauke.

In his latest column, our associate editor Sean O’Grady writes:

“Erm, I know Boris Johnson is an appalling human being, a liar and cheat, a cad and a bounder, a disgrace to his party and those he purports to lead, that he has misled parliament and behaved with the morals of an alley cat.

“But is anyone else beginning to miss him. I mean on the most bizarre grounds of all – policy-making?

“I say this because in the brief period since his government collapsed, it seems to me that his successor has proven that they are clearly going to be an even more authoritarian, even more populist, even more reckless character than he is.”

The Foreign Office (FCDO) has said it “regrets” the time taken to establish the decision-making process behind a controversial effort to evacuate animal welfare charity staff during the fraught Western exit from Afghanistan.

Earlier this year, MPs on the foreign affairs committee said in a scathing report that “multiple senior officials” believed Boris Johnson had made the decision to call Nowzad’s staff forward for evacuation – contrary to the claims of No 10 – and warned “we have yet to be offered a plausible alternative explanation”.

In its official response, the FCDO insisted ministers and officials had given evidence to the inquiry in “good faith”, and “at no stage” sought to be “deliberately” misleading – blaming an “error” in internal communication for some staff believing the prime minister had been the one to make the decision.

The department acknowledged that “more care should have been taken” within the department in how the decision was communicated to staff, adding: “The government regrets that it took as long as it did to establish what the decision-making process had been in this case, and how the decision was communicated internally to FCDO staff.”

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has addressed striking workers outside the BT Tower.

“Our job is to unite everyone in this campaign for real social justice. It’s called socialism where you don’t leave anyone behind,” the independent MP said.

He was joined by his former shadow chancellor John McDonnell and Sam Barry – who was sacked as a Labour shadow transport minister two days ago after telling broadcasters from the RMT’s picket line that all workers deserved pay rises in line with inflation.

Here are more details on the Labour MP’s appearance in central London today: