Liz Truss claimed the Conservatives would have walked away with a better result at the general election if she had remained party leader.
Speaking at a fringe event within the annual Conservative Party conference, the former prime minister – who lost her South West Norfolk seat in July – Truss confidently suggested she would have helped the party evade their abysmal loss.
The Telegraph’s Tim Stanley said: “One of our readers asked, if you had battled on in your premiership and held on, do you think a Tory party led by you would have done better than one led by Rishi Sunak at the last election?”
“Yes I do,” Truss replied, to a flurry of approving noise from the audience.
The Tories now have just 121 seats in parliament, having lost a whopping 251 MPs in the election under Rishi Sunak’s leadership as Labour romped to a landslide victory.
Pressed over why she would have done better than her successor, Truss said: “When I was in No.10, Reform was polling at 3%. By the time we got to the election, I think they got 18% because we promised change that we didn’t deliver.
“Now of course without the support of the parliamentary party, it was very difficult for me to get my changes through.
“And if you have people in the parliamentary party saying, ‘It’s Liz Truss’s fault this has happened, not the Bank of England’s fault’ – which is what people did and what they are still doing – it’s very difficult for me to deliver that change.”
She said if the mini-Budget “had been allowed to succeed”, there would be lower corporation tax, more companies operating in this country, more fracking, and more duty-free shoppers in the UK.
Asked if she could have led the Tories into a victory, she said: “I thought this is in 2022, I think it was a very tall order to win. I think our best chance of winning would have been to have kept Boris [Johnson]. I think it was a very stupid move of some of my colleagues to undermine Boris, and they still haven’t admitted that.”
However, she said the “second best option” would have been pursuing the economic policies which introduced change to the UK.
The former PM had the shortest premiership in UK history, having been kicked out after just 44 days in office because of her disastrous mini-Budget in autumn 2022.
She has refused to take responsibility for sending the markets into chaos in the years since leaving office, instead blaming the Bank of England.
Truss, who was an MP for 14 years, also lost her huge majority of 26,195 to Labour’s Terry Jermy, who won by 630 votes.
Addressing her own defeat, she said: “Reform took a lot of my vote in South West Norfolk.
“I was frankly in quite a difficult position because I was standing under a very orthodox Conservative Party while being a very unorthodox Conservative myself, so it’s quite a mixed message, I appreciate, to the electorate.
“But that’s what happened to us in a lot of seats.”
She also claimed Labour’s victory was a “one-off” because they were “fed up” with the Conservatives not delivering.
However, Truss did not say if she wanted to return to parliament.
“I’m currently thinking about what to do,” she said. “What is certainly true is I’m not going to give up on this fight. I think the fight of our lifetime, saving Western civilisation, and that is what I am focusing on.”
She also refused to say whether she missed working as an MP when asked by Stanley, saying that she enjoys politics and debate, but claimed: “I think parliament has become a shadow of its former self.”
She also did not announce her backing for any of the candidates fighting to be the next Tory leader, saying she had not seen any of them acknowledge “how bad things are” in both the country and in the Conservative Party.
Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick are all fighting to replace Sunak as the next leader of the Conservative Party.