Liz Truss targets 'secret Tories' with new campaign

Liz Truss is back. The former prime minister has launched a campaign to "galvanize" Britain's "secret Conservatives" and fight back against the "left wing extremists" she claims have taken over Britain's institutions.

In a speech in the grand surroundings of Westminster's Emmanuel Centre, Ms Truss said successive Tory governments had failed "to stand up for Conservative values".

She accused Conservative ministers of "pandering to the anti-capitalists" in the environmental movement and elsewhere - and some Tory MPs of caring more about being "popular at London dinner parties" than pursuing policies popular with voters.

She told a hall packed with Britain's leading right wingers, including Professor David Starkey and Vote Leave director Matthew Elliott, that the Popular Conservatism movement would challenge "wokery" and, ultimately, "restore faith in democracy".

What she did not do was directly attack Rishi Sunak. The people behind Popular Conservativism - or Pop Con for short - insist they are not out to undermine the prime minister or wreck his general election campaign.

Sir Simon Clarke - the leading right winger who recently called for Mr Sunak to go - was asked not to speak at the launch event, we are told.

Pop Con director Mark Littlewood, a longtime friend and ally of Ms Truss, told the crowd it also wasn't about seeking to "replicate or replace" existing factions of Tory MPs - groups who've been dubbed the "five families", who, Mr Littlewood said, had modelled themselves on the old school New York mafia.

It was, rather, about attacking the quangos and bureaucrats who "share the same sort of leftist groupthink" and are "sneering about ordinary people's beliefs".

In broad terms, the Pop Con argument is that Conservatives have been blocked from cutting taxes, cracking down on immigration and doing a lot of other things that they say people want by a network of unelected bodies who are undermining democracy.

Chief among the villains are the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which blocked deportations to Rwanda, and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which helped sink Ms Truss's "radical" tax cutting programme.

In his speech, Jacob Rees Mogg said people around the world - from the US to Argentina - were rising up against these "international cabals and quangos". He declared the death of "Davos man" - members of the global and political elite who descend on a Swiss ski resort every year for a global economic forum.

Lee Anderson - who recently resigned as Conservative deputy chairman - took aim at COP 28, adding ordinary voters in his Ashfield constituency did not lie awake at night worrying about whether the UK would meet its net zero targets.

Tory election candidate Mhairi Fraser laid into the "nanny state", including Mr Sunak's "ludicrous" plan to ban cigarette sales.

But as is often the way at events like this, Nigel Farage was having the most fun and attracting the most media attention. Technically, he was there as a journalist, a GB News presenter, but in somewhat surreal scenes before the event kicked off, he was mobbed by reporters eager for a soundbite.

Are you a politician or a journalist, someone asked the one-time Brexit Party leader.

"It's a really good question," mused Mr Farage. "What are any of us?"

Would he like to be up on stage with his fellow right wingers? Would he re-join the Conservative Party?

"I think many of the things that Truss says make a lot sense but she is here with a group of people who are an embattled minority."

Recent opinion polls suggest Liz Truss remains one of the least popular politicians in the country and her party's poll ratings have never recovered from her brief, disastrous spell in Number 10.

Just before the launch, Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor she sacked after his mini budget crashed the economy, announced he was leaving politics.

Is she the right person to be launching an organisation with "popular" in its title?

Tory MP Brendan-Clarke Smith has no doubts.

"Liz is a hugely respected figure with a lot of great ideas," he told the BBC.

"She did a great job as foreign secretary. She did a great job with trade deals as well and I think people focus too much on that short period where we had a very turbulent time.

"But there are lot of ideas there that people still want to discuss. You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."