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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Liz Truss’s disastrous “mini” Budget is clouding the Conservatives’ reputation on the economy going into the general election, according to polling that underscores the party’s struggle to escape the former prime minister’s legacy.
More than half of voters — 52 per cent — who think the UK economy is in a poor state point the finger of blame at decisions made by Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, nearly two years after the mini-Budget rocked financial markets.
The Ipsos polling vindicates Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s repeated references to Truss during the campaign and highlights the failure of Rishi Sunak to cast off the impact of his predecessor.
Sunak reminded MPs in April that he had warned during the 2022 Tory leadership contest about Truss’s tax-cutting plans. He said at the time they would “tip millions of people into misery”. Sunak added: “I was right then.”
But in spite of claiming to be the “change” candidate at last year’s Tory conference — a move intended to shed some of his party’s political baggage of 14 years in power — the Truss legacy has proved hard to shift.
Starmer has more successfully moved on from the Jeremy Corbyn years. The former Labour leader was suspended from the party after saying accusations of antisemitism in the party during his leadership had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”. Corbyn was last month expelled from Labour and said he would contest his Islington North seat as an independent candidate.
The Ipsos poll shows that the majority of voters still feel the economy is in a bad way, at 70 per cent. The biggest factor, identified by 54 per cent of voters, was the Covid-19 pandemic.
But wider decisions during 14 years of Conservative rule were also blamed for the economy’s struggles, as well as Brexit (50 per cent) and Sunak’s own policies (42 per cent), according to the Ipsos poll covering 1,130 British adults conducted from May 31 to June 3.
The findings underscore the mountain the Tories need to climb to improve their reputation for economic competence. The share of poll respondents who think the economy is good is at the highest level since 2022, but at 26 per cent it is heavily overshadowed by those who think the economy is in a poor state.
Of those who say the economy is doing well, about 39 per cent credit Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt, followed by 33 per cent who attribute the improvements to the Bank of England.
Sunak has come under fire from within his party for going to the polls in July rather than waiting for further evidence of an improving economy to help boost the mood of the electorate. Inflation has now dropped to 2.3 per cent as of April, a far cry from highs exceeding 11 per cent in 2022, while the economy emerged from a shallow technical recession in the first quarter, growing by 0.6 per cent.
