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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Politics
Kevin Maguire

'Poundshop Thatchers Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are a gift to Labour'

Poundshop Thatchers Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are firmly stuck in the wrong century.

The infantile couple scraping to grab the Conservative crown and be installed as Prime Minister without a General Election only demonstrates their unsuitability for No 10 by clinging to her hem.

Thatcher died nine years back and was toppled 32 years ago by Conservative MPs who recognised, even then, the Rusted Lady was past her use-by date and a public liability.

Wannabes Truss and Sunak posing as her ideological heirs are inadvertently focusing attention on their lack of ideas for the future to resolve problems created during the past dozen years. That’s of course while their party has been in power.

The cost of living crisis and collapsing public services are on the watch of a pair suddenly and implausibly pretending it has nothing to do with them.

Labour leader Keir Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves will ram home this inconvenient truth on a visit to Liverpool.

Rishi Sunak at the ITV debate (ITV via Getty Images)

Blue-on-blue attacks, Truss and Sunak slagging each other off and flagellating the Conservative Government, are a gift for the reds.

The more those two worship a Thatcher who divided Britain, the less they’ll unite the country.

Backward not Forward is a losing election slogan.

It’s why wooing fewer than 200,000 Tory members, a tiddly 0.3% of the inhabitants of a nation of more than 67 million people (a weird, reactionary, obsessive 0.3% at that) so distorts our politics.

'Poundshop Thatchers Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are firmly stuck in the wrong century' (Mondadori via Getty Images)

The electorate in particular won’t buy the £30billion “free” money promised by Truss when it isn’t credible. Her economic guru Patrick Minford admits this cranky idea could send mortgage and interest rates rocketing to 7%.

Nor will inciting racists work as effectively when Britain in 2022 is a more tolerant land than 1979.

No wonder Labour’s confident it would beat Truss or Sunak and Thatcher in a General Election.

And what an irony that the dreadful duo vow to destroy one of Thatcher’s few decent legacies, Channel 4.

Starmer’s the clear winner in this Tory leadership contest before a single vote is cast.

Luck is an underestimated currency in politics. Starmer and Labour have hit the jackpot just when the Tories are going crackpot.

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