This Tory leadership campaign has become a clearance sale of bad policies

Liz Truss wanted to cut public sector pay outside London, while Rishi Sunak proposed £10 fines for missing NHS appointments – less haste, better policy, says John Rentoul

Perhaps this is a cunning plan to tempt Truss into overreaching (PA)

Liz Truss’s latest brilliant wheeze was a short-lived plan to cut public sector pay outside London by £11bn a year. She tried to imply that these savings will come from abolishing “diversity and inclusion” jobs but you didn’t need a maths A-level to know that those sums didn’t add up. A few hours later, the policy was dropped.

So many terrible policies are being thrown out by the two candidates that it is hard to keep up with pointing out how wrong-headed they are. The other day Rishi Sunak was proposing a £10 fine for missing NHS appointments – a policy ironically proposed by Truss several years ago.

Since then, anyone who has thought about it for more than two minutes has been pointing out the problems of the extra admin trying to extract fines from patients who, because they are ill, cannot always organise their lives as well as a former chancellor.

It might be possible to welcome this leadership campaign as a carnival of democracy, a bazaar of new policy ideas that will help refresh a tired and unimaginative government. Perhaps the candidates should be cheered on as they propose ever more outrageous policies in the hope that one or two of them might turn out not to be a dud. I am not convinced.

The campaign started as an auction of tax cuts, which Sunak rightly described as fairytales, but the candidate proposing the biggest tax cuts beat the one offering medium tax cuts (Penny Mordaunt) to make it to the run-off, where fairytales might win.

Sunak can explain all he likes how an immediate VAT cut on energy bills and a distant promise of ultra-low income tax rates are consistent with his realism – and they are, if you pay close attention to the small print – but it looks as if he is retreating.

Perhaps this is a cunning plan to tempt Truss into overreaching. The plan to cut the civil service and public sector pay may be regarded by Tory members as a merely symbolic gesture, never intended to be implemented, signifying a frugal approach to the public finances – to distract attention from the huge increase in borrowing that Truss is actually proposing.

But cutting public sector pay outside the South East is not an obvious vote-winner. No one knows what levelling up means, but they know it doesn’t mean that.

There were a couple of signs that Truss was becoming overconfident in last night’s hustings in Exeter. She said, “There’s only one thing the EU understands, and that is strength,” in language she has previously used about Vladimir Putin.

Then she insulted the devolved Scottish administration, saying, “The best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is ignore her,” and calling her an attention-seeker. The audience of Tory activists loved it. Bashing the EU and the SNP are what they joined the party for, but neither is wise for a future prime minister to say out loud.

On the other hand, Truss pretended to do a bit of responsible realism, copying Sunak’s theme of telling Tory members what they don’t want to hear, in her case about hunting. She didn’t want to open that Pandora’s Box, she told someone who wanted to unban it. But I suspect that is a fairly safe subject on which to disappoint the Tory fundamentalists, as there are a lot of animal-rights supporters among the membership too.

That felt like a token gesture when set against Sunak’s genuinely tough message about fiscal responsibility. Almost the only substance of this campaign has been Sunak’s defence of the unalterable fact that, ultimately, the NHS and other public services have to be paid for out of taxation. He won enthusiastic applause last night for explaining why corporation tax rates should rise next year, but I doubt that it will save him.

This whole campaign has been about appearances rather than reality. Sunak looks as if he is retreating on tax cuts when he is (however unwisely) setting out aspirations for the distant future. Truss looks as if she is prepared to do more to help people with the cost of living now, even though her tax cuts cannot take effect until next year and are not the best way of doing it.

But she has momentum. The sight of MPs rushing to the aid of the victor is unedifying. What is it about Truss’s imminent ability to make ministerial appointments that first attracted you to her, Ben Wallace, Tom Tugendhat, Nadhim Zahawi and Penny Mordaunt? Nevertheless, it helps reinforce the impression that Truss is winning.

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Sunak’s campaign has been saved from the appearance of retreat turning into the reality of a rout by the publication of a mysterious opinion poll of Tory members by Techne, which suggests that he is just six points behind Truss, 53 per cent to 47 per cent, when don’t knows are excluded.

This compares with a 24-point Truss lead in a YouGov poll that was published 12 days ago. (The Techne poll was carried out over a longer period, including the time YouGov were polling, but carried on until last Wednesday.)

It is not clear who commissioned the Techne poll, and the company was taken by surprise when some of its findings were published last night, but it obviously helps Sunak by suggesting that the contest is closer than we thought.

In the battle of perceptions, Sunak has a chance to fight back, but only if he avoids bad policies that disintegrate on arrival. Let us hope we have heard the last of £10 fines in the NHS.