Liz Truss news latest: Crispin Blunt becomes first Tory MP to call for PM to go

Tory MP Crispin Blunt has said the “game is up” for Liz Truss and that she’s got to go.

He does not think the prime minister can cling on to power, he told Channel 4 in tonight’s episode of Andrew Neil Show.

“I think the game is up and it’s now a question as to how the succession is managed,” Mr Blunt said.

Asked how the Tories will get rid of her, he said: “If there is such a weight of opinion in the parliamentary party that we have to have a change, then it will be effected.

“Exactly how it is done and exactly under what mechanism… but it will happen.”

Jeremy Hunt has said that Liz Truss has “changed” as he urged Conservative MPs not to ditch their third prime minister in four years.

The new chancellor warned that voters would not thank the party for further political and economical instability.

He told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme that people could still put their faith in her, despite the turmoil of recent days, and that Ms Truss remained “in charge”.

You can read the full story here by Kate Devlin

Royal College of Nursing has warned chancellor Jeremy Hunt against making cuts to the Department of Health’s budget.

Mr Hunt, a former health secretary, has signalled that all departments will be forced to find more savings and cut costs.

On his third day on the job, he said he was “not taking anything off the table”.

The RCN is currently balloting for strike action.

Pat Cullen, general secretary of RCN, said: “If the new chancellor is serious about spending money more wisely, then he must invest in the nursing workforce.

“Asking the Department of Health to make yet more efficiencies – in other words, to cut costs – when the need to invest in the NHS and social care is greater than ever, does not make sense.

“Mr Hunt must put patients first. The nursing workforce crisis is undermining safe patient care and with many choosing to leave the profession for better-paid jobs elsewhere, the need to pay a demoralised and unvalued profession fairly could not be more pressing.

“These considerations must be uppermost in Mr Hunt’s mind as he announces the government’s economic reset.”

The Sunday Times has issued a damning call for Liz Truss to resign, dubbing her a “pointless prime minister — an empty vessel with no policies or power.”

The newspaper has suggested that PM’s leadership contest rival Rishi Sunak take her place in No 10, and demanded the Tories call an election “after the immediate crisis has passed.”

“Truss has wrecked the Conservative Party’s reputation for fiscal competence and humiliated Britain on the international stage,” The Sunday Times View reads. “Senior Tories must now act in the national interest and remove her from Downing Street as quickly as possible.”

“Britain cannot tolerate a further two years of instability, and it would be more strategically astute for the Conservatives to let Labour confront the economic challenges of the next few years if they are to stand a chance of returning to power in the near future.

“Once in opposition, the Tories must regroup and take time to reflect on how they arrived at the dire position they are in today.”

Crispin Blunt has become the first Conservative MP to publicly call for Liz Truss “to go and to go now”, according to Channel 4’s head of news Louisa Compton.

The MP for Reigate is set to issue his appeal for her resignation when he appears on the Andrew Neil Show tonight.

Former chancellor George Osborne will also tell the veteran political journalist that the prime minister will likely be gone “before Christmas”.

Meanwhile, ex-health secretary Matt Hancock is expected to take a more optimistic tack, saying Ms Truss can survive if she acts now.

The quicker this shambolic government is gone, the quicker we can fix their mess, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said as the party gears up for the next general election.

“The prime minister’s humiliating, partial U-turn was necessary. But the damage has been done. The Conservatives have to go. Britain needs a fresh start,” he wrote in an article for The Mirror.

Sir Keir continued: “We’ll create Great British Energy, a home-grown energy company, to ensure we are independent of tyrants like Putin.

“That’s a vision of a future where the whole country contributes to building something better. It makes a mockery of outdated, failed Tory ideology.

“I’m excited to get going. Because the quicker this shambolic government is gone, the quicker we can fix their mess.”

Conservative MP Robert Halfon said Liz Truss’s government needs a reset “pretty soon”.

Speaking to Times Radio, he said: “I don’t think that [the PM] grasps just how badly the public feel that the government have been over the past few weeks.”

He reiterated that he is not calling for Ms Truss to go, but he wants an “apology and a fundamental reset”.

Asked about the situation amongst his colleagues in Westminster, Mr Halfon said: “In all my time in Parliament I have never experienced such a kind of grim and melancholic atmosphere, because people fear that the government started off, sadly, so badly.”

Earlier, he told Sky News that Ms Truss should apologise to the British public for her mini-Budget that was akin to an experiment in “libertarian jihadism”.

Senior Tory MP Alicia Kearns sighed when she was asked if Liz Truss could survive as prime minister, and added that answering the question is “incredibly difficult”.

Ms Kearns, the new chairwoman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, told Times Radio: “Ultimately it is a very difficult [question] because I think you know we’ve had the questions around our moral competency.”

She continued: “We’ve now got questions around our fiscal competency.

“I don’t want further questions around even our ability to continue to govern as a party and our ability to stay united. It’s an incredibly difficult one, and ultimately I need to listen to colleagues and speak to colleagues over coming days.

“But do we need a fundamental reset? Without question.”

Tory MP Andrew Griffith refused to say whether he thinks Liz Truss will still be PM at Christmas.

The Treasury minister told Times Radio: “I think Liz enjoys the confidence of the government. She’s the prime minister and the last thing that I think anybody wants is to see more instability.”

Earlier, on Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday, he said that a new Tory or Labour PM “would increase the level of uncertainty.”

“People at home are just tearing their hair out at the level of uncertainty. What they want to see is a competent government getting on with that job,” he said.

Matt Hancock has led calls for PM Liz Truss to reshuffle her Cabinet.

He said she had to bring the breadth of the Conservative Party into her government.

Mr Hancock, who had to resign as health secretary after being caught violating his own Covid social distancing rules by having an affair with his aide, said: “There’s a huge amount of talent on the backbenches. I’m not talking about me.”

His comments come days after Ms Truss sacked Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor in a bid to save her reputation after their mini-Budget trashed the economy.

You can read the full story by Kate Devlin here