Penny Mordaunt, who is backing the frontrunner in the Tory leadership race, said Mr Truss’ comments had been misconstrued and wanted to prioritize tax cuts. But a supporter of Rishi Sunak said Truss was “absolutely wrong” and the former chancellor knew “more may be needed and is prepared to do so as required”. The row arose after Truss gave an interview to the Financial Times on Friday, in which she said she would “look at what else can be done” in light of warnings from the Bank of England of a 15-month recession and double-digit growth. inflation that will last well into 2023. But the foreign secretary added: “The way I would go about it is in a conservative way to reduce the tax burden, not hand out leaflets.” Mordaunt told Sky News: “It’s not that she rules out all future help. This is a misinterpretation of what he said. “But what it’s looking at is enabling people to keep more of the money they earn. “It doesn’t make sense to take money from people and then give it back in very, very complicated ways. We need to simplify this and we need to make sure that households are as resilient as possible and stopping people being taxed heavily is one way of doing that.” Mordaunt also suggested that long-term economic reform is more important, saying: “It’s all very well to alleviate a problem and the squeeze that people are feeling, but we need to get growth back into the economy if we don’t want that to become the norm.” After Sunak claimed Truss’ plans for huge tax cuts would fuel inflation, Mordaunt said: “Tax cuts don’t need to be inflationary because we’re dealing with the twin problems of inflation and weak demand in the economy.” Damian Hinds, the former security minister, who is backing Sunak, said his candidate was prepared to do more. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST While he said the measures announced by Sunak in the spring were aimed at helping “the most vulnerable households”, Hinds admitted: “Things have gotten worse even since it was put in place in terms of predictions of what the energy bills in the future and has been clear that more may be needed and is prepared to do so as required.” In a jab at Truss’ dislike of “leaflets”, Hinds said: “It is completely wrong to rule out this kind of direct support.” Truss pledged to reverse a rise in national insurance from April implemented by Sunak to pay for changes to social care, temporarily scrap green levies on energy bills and scrap a rise in corporation tax. He said the money would come from around £30bn of budget surplus, but Sunak has warned it could be quickly wiped out by worsening economic headwinds. Sunak’s team said scrapping the National Insurance increase would leave a full-time worker on the National Living Wage with just £59, while someone on a six-figure salary would receive more than £1,000. With around four weeks still to go in the Tory leadership race, Truss’ team is already drawing up plans for an emergency budget to be delivered within weeks of taking office.
