MIRIAM Cates has become the latest Tory MP to voice doubts over the leadership of the Prime Minister, saying she does not know if Liz Truss should lead the party into the next election.
Asked if she wanted Liz Truss to lead the party into the next election, in an interview with Gloria De Piero and Mark Longhurst on GB News, she said: “I don’t know. I mean, I think the polling is really bad.
“I don’t think we should always be following the polling and we shouldn’t be creating our policy off the back of polling, but I think that the key thing I would like to see her and the government address is this realignment that got us elected to office in 2019.
“Actually, the arguments that are going on in the press and in the Conservative Party at the moment seem to be between the kind of libertarian free market marketeers and a kind of social democrat technocratic tradition.
“Now both of those have important traditions that we can learn from, but actually neither of those points of view are shared by the majority of people that elected us in 2019 that want to see good public services, that want to see a strong British identity, they want to have control over the communities.
“That’s the kind of language we need to be speaking if we’re going to go into the next election strongly.”
She said: “Clearly it is a big day for Liz Truss and the Conservative Party as a whole and I think on a personal level, I feel an enormous amount of sympathy for her.
“She’s a wife, she’s a mum at the end of the day it is incredibly challenging, personal circumstances for her, but I do think the key thing here is to emit a message of stability.
“We’ve had a huge amount of instability in the last few weeks huge amount of changes in government and personnel and in policy, and I think what we’re really looking for now is a stable, coherent message that’s all about facing up to the very difficult economic circumstances we find ourselves in and how we’re going to run the country through that crisis.”
Asked about the prospect of the Government dropping the triple lock on state pensions, Ms Cates added: “It’s very clear that we need to protect the incomes of the lowest paid right now.
“Of course, that includes pensioners on fixed incomes…I think it’s right to consider it but I absolutely would not support that right now, the ditching of the triple lock, the ditching of the inflation measure.
“It’s true that the mini budget caused an awful lot of crisis in the financial markets, or perhaps triggered at an interest rate rise that would have come sooner or later but came earlier than expected and that’s absolutely true.
“But I think we must be clear, this is an economic crisis in the West that has been a long time coming. We’ve had very low interest rates. We have a terrible balance of trade in this country. We rely a huge amount on foreign investment, and we have a very unbalanced economy.
“Those are huge structural problems in our economy that were not caused by the mini budget and I think for Labour’s sake as well, if and when they came to power, they would have exactly the same problems to deal with.”
