Inside Politics: Penultimate hustings

Former chancellor questions UK Covid strategy ahead of penultimate hustings event in Norwich, writes Matt Mathers

Rishi Sunak and leadership rival Liz Truss (Ben Birchall/Clodagh Kilcoyne/PA)

Hello there, I’m Matt Mathers and welcome to The Independent’s Inside Politics newsletter.

As hundreds of thousands of teenagers get their GCSE results, let’s hope Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have done their homework for the penultimate leadership hustings tonight. Ahead of the event, the chancellor has given an explosive interview to a magazine in which he claims the government ceded too much power to professors during the Covid pandemic.

Inside the bubble

Parliament is not sitting.

Shadow schools minister Stephen Morgan on Times Radio at 8.35am.

Schools minister Will Quince on GB News at 9.05am.

Tory leadership hustings on TalkTV at 7pm.

Daily briefing

Lockdown sceptic

Many readers will have woken up to rain this morning. But there is some good news: tonight is the penultimate Tory leadership hustings, with Sunak and Truss going head-to-head in Norwich as the never-ending contest to replace Boris Johnson nears its rather anti-climatic conclusion.

Or could we see some fireworks tonight? The former chancellor has given a pretty explosive interview to The Spectator magazine, published on its website earlier. In it, Sunak – free to speak his mind now that he is out of the government – openly questions the path taken by the UK during the Covid pandemic.

He says the government, of which he was a part, failed to properly consider the wider impact lockdowns would have in terms of the economy and excess death from people not attending hospital. Sunak also says it was “wrong” to “scare” people about the threat posed by Covid and argues that scientists on SAGE ended up with too much power.

Expect him to face questions about this later in the hustings, chaired by the lockdown-sceptic TalkTV host Julia Hartley-Brewer. She’ll surely want to know why Sunak didn’t object more to Covid policy while he was resident in No 11 Downing Street, and why he didn’t resign from the government if he was, as he is claiming now, so opposed to the strategy mapped out by the government.

With the energy price cap set to rise again tomorrow in Ofgem’s latest announcement, the main agenda item in the hustings will once again be how to deal with the soaring energy bills. One think tank says the government would need to spend more than £110bn to cover almost all of Britons’ extra energy costs over the next year.

The British Chambers of Commerce – whose members the cap does not apply to – has this morning made an intervention into the crisis, calling on the government and Tory leadership rivals to offer businesses immediate, Covid-style support. “Firms cannot afford to wait another month without practical support measures being put in place,” the CBI says. “Now is the time for action.” The Resolution Foundation, meanwhile, has urged whoever wins the contest to reconsider their plans and bring in a “solidarity tax” of 1 per cent on all earners to help pay for extra support for gas and electricity costs.

Rishi Sunak and leadership rival Liz Truss (Ben Birchall/Clodagh Kilcoyne/PA)

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

Expect Truss to also face questions on her comments earlier in the week that she would divert billions of pounds earmarked for the NHS into social care.

The foreign secretary is coming under fire from health experts over the remarks. At a Tory leadership hustings event in Birmingham on Tuesday night, she said that too much money from the annual £13bn package committed to tackling Covid backlogs was going to the NHS.

“I would spend that money in social care,” she told Tory members. “Quite a lot has gone to the NHS. I would give it to local authorities. We have people in beds in the NHS who would be better off in social care. So put that money into social care.”

Experts from think tanks and NHS trusts welcomed Truss’s recognition that the sector needs more funding, but warned that simply moving cash from social care to the NHS would be equivalent to “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

In other health news, NHS leaders are warning that soaring food and energy bills will create a “huge mental health crisis” this winter putting further strain on services and risking “people’s life chances”.

As household bills dramatically increase, Saffron Cordery, the interim chief executive of NHS Providers which represents NHS trusts across England, said there was a direct link between deprivation and a surge in demand for care.

Today’s cartoon

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(Dave Brown)

On the record

Tim Gardner, a senior policy fellow at the Health Foundation, on Truss’s plan to divert NHS funding.

“While increased funding for social care would help free up beds and relieve pressure on A&E and ambulance services, this does not save the health service money and there would be consequences for patients waiting for hospital treatment and on staff morale. Rising inflation and government’s unwillingness to provide extra funding for recently announced staff pay increases have put even more pressure on already squeezed NHS budgets.”

From the Twitterati

Chris Curtis, head of polling at Opinium, on Emily Maitlis’s claims of a Tory ‘agent’ influencing BBC news output.

“It’s clear the Tories have put pressure on supposed ‘independent’ organisations over the past few years who have put out stuff that’s unfavourable towards them. It’s important that people can call this kind of influence out without being shut down.”

Essential reading

• John Rentoul, The Independent: Truss’s incoherent promises of tax cuts only mean one thing – more national debt
• Tom Peck, The Independent: Patel is proud of her record – and soon, we might even miss her
• Martin Kettle, The Guardian: Think it’s all over? Think again. If Truss wins, she will have to call an election
• Caitlan Flanagan, The Atlantic: America’s fire sale

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