Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak Tory leadership hustings in Darlington gets under way – UK politics live | Politics

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Key events (19)Rishi Sunak (21)Liz Truss (18)Boris Johnson (6)Tom Newton Dunn (5)Dominic Raab (3)

Newton Dunn puts it to Sunak that, although he claims “efficiency savings” will fund his next energy support package, that is not possible.

Sunak says Newton Dunn is wrong. He says he has found £1bn through efficiency savings to fund military aid to Ukraine.

Tories will be ‘absolutely hammered’ at election if they don’t target energy bills support on those most in need, says Sunak

Q: You spent £15bn on your last support package for energy bills. Are you willing to spend the same again?

Sunak says last time he provided help to people most in need. He will do the same again. And he will go further this time, because bills are going up.

He says Truss was “wrong” to rule out direct support for households.

(Truss did say last week she was opposed to “handouts”, but now she is not ruling out that sort of support.)

Sunak says the Tours should target help on people who need it most.

If they don’t, “the British people will not forgive us”, he says.

Our support should be targeted, not on massive tax cuts for very wealthy people, it should be targeted on helping the people who most need it.

And if we don’t do that, I can tell you not only will millions of people suffer, we will get absolutely hammered when it comes to an election. The British people will not forgive us for not doing that.

This is a version of the argument used by Dominic Raab in his Times article this morning. See 9.13am.

Sunak takes questions

The first half of the hustings, the opening speeches, is over. The two candidates are now taking questions.

Sunak goes first.

Q: Why are you so behind?

Sunak says the campaign has only just started.

Updated at 20.04 BSTE

Truss says the next PM will have to be someone who can deliver.

As an international trade secretary, she delivered trade deals. People said it could not be done, she claimed. But she she delivered more and better deals.

And she claims that she got the Northern Ireland protocol bill through parliament.

(That is not true. It has gone through the House of Commons, but it has not started its passage through the Lords yet, and it is widely expected that when peers do start considering it, they will remove many of its key components.)

Updated at 20.05 BS

Truss is now talking about policy. The government needs to get rid of unnecessary retained EU law, she says. Taxes need to be lower. And corporation tax needs to stay low to promote investment. She would have low-tax enterprise zones, she says.

And she would change planning rules. She was a councillor, and sat in planning meetings. It was pointless, she implies, because key decisions were taken in Whitehall. She would give more power to local communities.

She says as foreign secretary she has stood up to Russia and supported Ukraine.

She says it is important to ensure the British bill of rights is not overruled by the European court of human rights.

As a straight-talking Yorkshire woman, she knows a woman is a woman. But there are people in Whitehall who don’t know that, she says.

Updated at 19.55 BSTE

Liz Truss arrives and says it is fantastic to be in Darlington. She remembers when Ben Houchen and Simon Clarke were elected in 2017. They made a crack in the red wall but 2019 was a demolition job. The Tories won constituencies like Darlington, and Tony Blair’s Sedgefield. As Blair would say, “things can only get better”.

Truss says she is not from a traditional Tory background. She was brought up in Paisley and in Leeds. She went to a comprehensive school, and she says pupils were being let down because people did not have ambitions for them. She blames the leftwing Leeds council.

(The many comments from Truss’s contemporaries in Leeds saying that she is wrong about this – see here and here, for example – don’t seem to have had any impact on her spiel.)

Updated at 19.52 BSTE

Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the international trade secretary, is speaking now, introducing Liz Truss.

Both candidates are fantastic, she says, but she is backing Truss for three reasons. First, she is incredibly ambitious for the country. She is bold in taking decisions. And she is confident she can succeed.

She says the Northern Ireland protocol bill is an example of Truss pushing something through to make sure the union stays secures.

And she went to Russia to take on her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. She had to be bold to do that, Trevelyan says.

And Trust is confident for the country. She thinks the best days of the country are ahead of us.

Updated at 19.45 BSTE

This is from my colleague Jessica Elgot, who is at the hustings.

At the Darlington hustings, around 40% of those in the audience raise their hands when asked if they are still undecided. I met several Tory members early who told me the same. Polls telling different story.

— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) August 9, 2022

Newton Dunn asks people to raise their hands if they have not decided how much they will vote yet. The party approved the question, he says. He reckons about 40% of the audience put their hands up.

Sunak says, to win the election, the Tories will have to win over swing voters. All the evidence suggests he is the best candidate to do that, he says.

He says people saw him act during the pandemic. He would bring “the same sense of urgency and grip” to other problems as PM.

And he says he will “work my socks off” to ensure that people can be proud of the Conservative government he would lead.

Seven years ago he asked to be selected candidate for Richmond. Being selected was the greatest privilege of his life, and many of those people who selected him are here tonight. He says he is now asking to be selected as PM.

Sunak says he wants to “stand up to this leftie woke up culture that seems to want to cancel our history, our values ​​and our women”.

He would have a bold plan to tackle illegal immigration, he says.

He says he would tackle inflation, because it makes everyone poorer.

And he says he has been surprised to be described as anti-Brexit, because he actually voted for Brexit. (Liz Truss didn’t.)

Updated at 19.48 BSTE

Sunak suggests as PM he would move some Downing Street staff to Darlington

Sunak has moved off the joke, and he is talking about his values. They are patriotism, family service, hard work and aspiration. And he tells the audience he knows they are their values ​​too – because they are Conservative values.

He says he wants to restore trust, fix the economy, and reunite the country.

On trust, he says it is important to be honest. He says he has not helped himself in the contest because he has been honest.

He put the Treasury in Darlington because he wanted to show Whitehall that there was more to the north than Manchester.

And if he wins the contest, it won’t just be the Treasury campus in Darlington, but “the Downing Street campus in Darlington” too, he says.

Rishi Sunak comes on stage. He is laughing – although it is not obvious why, and his enthusiasm seems a tad contrived.

He says it has been great to be able to sleep in his own bed for the last two days. (Darlington is very close to his Richmond constituency.) But he is still obsessed with the campaign. He jokes that he realised he had been campaigning too much when he started telling his parents, who were staying, about how his mum used to run a chemist.

(If telling jokes is the key to winning this contest, then – judging by this – Boris Johnson will be staging a comeback.)

Updated at 19.32 BSTE

Angela Sterling is speaking now to introduce Rishi Sunak. She is a county councillor in Durham but she only joined the party recently, she says.

She says she joined because of what happened during Covid. As a small business owner she was terrified when the virus struck. She reached out to her MP, Richard Holden, a Conservative, and he got her involved in talks about what was needed. As a result, the bounceback loan scheme was created, she says.

She says she could not believe that the chancellor had been listening. It was her first positive experience of a politician, she says. She says as someone born and brought up in the north-east, she was used to being ignored by politicians. Even when Tony Blair, a north-east MP, was prime minister, he ignored the region, she claims.

She says Sunak has done more for the north-east than any other politician. He has even brought a government department, the Treasury, to Darlington, she says. (Not the whole Treasury – just a branch office.)

She says if Sunak can persuade her to join the Tories, “then taking on Keir Starmer is an absolute piece of cake”.

Updated at 19.50 BSTE

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