LIZ Truss said she will fight to keep the Conservative Party in government and criticised the treatment of Boris Johnson in an exclusive interview with GB News.
Speaking during a live broadcast from Leigh presented by Dan Wootton, she answered questions from audience members.
Asked about the House of Commons privileges committee report into Boris Johnson, she told GBNews: “I’m a believer in democracy. I know that Boris got a huge mandate, and he got a mandate to get Brexit done and to change Britain and people voted for him because he was optimistic about our country’s future.
“He had a vision. So, in the first place, what I think was wrong, was Conservative MPs removing an elected Prime Minister that so many people had voted for. And I think they’re sowing the seeds of huge problems for our party.”
Asked if she thought the committee was a kangaroo court, she said: “I’ve been very clear I think it was a massive mistake of the Conservative parliamentary party to remove Boris as our Prime Minister. I think that’s where all the problems here have started…
“I want the Prime Minister and the Conservatives to win the next election. I think Keir Starmer will be an absolute disaster. Another Labour leader from North London who will put up taxes, he’ll do a wealth tax.
“We’ve already got public spending at almost half of GDP, under Keir Starmer, God knows what it will go up to – 75%? Who knows, but it’d be a disaster. But what I do want to see is, I want to see our party pursuing those Conservative policies that people voted for.”
Asked if she felt vindicated by the current economic situation, she said: “I was very worried about the economic situation. And the fact that we’d had this low interest rate and cheap money for years and years, and we all knew it was coming to an end.
“But we hadn’t seen the Bank of England do enough to actually stop that inflation rising. So that is why we took bold action. And I was really clear about that in the leadership election. I remember talking about that here in Leigh last year when talking about those ideas…
“The reason that I don’t feel vindicated is I didn’t want to see people’s mortgages go up. I didn’t want to see people in Britain struggling.
“What I want to see is those Conservative economic policies that give people real hope for the future. So that is what I’m determined to do. I’m determined to fight for those policies.”
She added: “There is such resistance to change from much of the economic establishment. They are used to not being questioned. And the Bank of England which has run monetary policy independently since 1997, in my view, didn’t put interest rates up early enough.
“If they put up interest rates early, they wouldn’t have had to put them up so much, because we’d have dealt with inflation by now. And they also printed too much money.”
Asked about immigration, Ms Truss said: “Well, the way we stop the boats coming across, is making sure that every single person that arrives on a boat doesn’t get to stay in the United Kingdom. And it sounds simple, but that is the answer.
“That’s why I believe Rwanda is really important so there’s a safe place for people to go that isn’t the United Kingdom. But I think we also need to sort out our legal system, which allows too many of these people to sort of disappear and constantly appeal, so I think the processes need to be streamlined.
“And fundamentally, it’s about taking on the lefty lawyers who are constantly on the phone to illegal migrants trying to keep them in the United Kingdom.”
On Prince Harry, she said: “If Prince Harry wants to come back to Britain, I think we should welcome him back. I do think we should, I know that’s not popular necessarily with the audience, but I think he is now not on the list to be paid for the royal family.
“He should be able to go about his business and get a job like everybody else in his country.”
Asked about eco-protesters, she said: “What these people are, is they are watermelons. They are green on the outside and red on the inside, in Communism and Socialism.
“We should understand that they are trying to undermine all of the values that we believe in as Conservatives, whether it’s free enterprise, free speech, all of those things, they are trying to undermine, and this is just their new way of doing it.
“This is a new form of Marxism, and we should fight them in just the way that we fought the CND or the communist sympathisers in the 1970s and 80s.”
Asked about the BBC, Ms Truss said: “I would love to see the BBC become a subscription service that people pay for if they want it and I would sell off Channel 4.
“I think the days of a licence fee that’s compulsory is wrong, and I think people going to prison for not paying their licence fee is wrong .”
