Truss-backing MP John Redwood compares Rishi Sunak to Gordon Brown - it backfires terribly

Ah, we remember when Tory leadership candidate Penny Mordaunt called for a clean contest among the candidates, which is kind of like telling a hungry five-year-old not to eat the last cookie on the kitchen counter.

Former chancellor Rishi Sunak has slammed foreign secretary Liz Truss’ economic plans as “socialism” and asked her if she most regretted being a remainer or Liberal Democrat, while Ms Truss went after Mr Sunak’s private education in response.

How wonderful that they’re now the last two candidates to go to the Conservative Party membership for the final vote. There’s more than a month of this still to go, folks!

And if it’s not the Tory MPs standing who are throwing out attack lines about their opponent, then it’s their supporters.

Enter Liz Truss backer and Wokingham MP, John Redwood.

“Rishi Sunak says he wants to become a Thatcherite. In office he was a Gordon Brown tribute act,” he tweeted on Friday morning.

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Unfortunately for him, people have since pointed out that there was a whole financial crisis back in 2008, which they claim Mr Brown did a pretty good job of addressing:

There’s facts to back this up, too. According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK government’s deficit was £76.4 billion (or 4.9 per cent of GDP) when Brown was prime minister in 2008 – compared to £187.4 billion at the end of 2021 when Sunak was chancellor.

Oops.

Despite the public roasting, Mr Redwood went on to issue more digs at Mr Sunak's campaign for Conservative Party leader, telling his Twitter followers to "expect more Project Fear" from the former chancellor's team.

Listing the sort of things to anticipate from Mr Sunak's backers - apparently - he wrote: "We must put taxes up. We must make the cost of living squeeze worse. We should not stand up to the EU over NI and VAT. We should make business laws competitive with higher taxes."

In another tweet, he added: "I wanted Rishi to succeed as chancellor and gave him some advice. I warned him against breaking his word on the national insurance rise. I said printing so much money in 2021 would be inflationary. He preferred Treasury boom bust policies based on wrong forecasts."

Put the phone down, John.

It isn’t the first time that Mr Redwood has been roasted on Twitter either, as in August last year he took aim at climate activist Greta Thunberg and told her to “concentrate on China which produces 27 times the amount of CO2 the UK does”.

Except he appeared to forget that the UK is somewhat responsible for that as a result of us relying on China for the production of goods.

Then it was only a month later that the Tory MP suggested companies which use Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGV) “need to learn” from online companies, who have “attracted lots of extra drivers to do parcel van deliveries”.

Aside from the obvious point that a parcel van can’t exactly be compared to a HGV, the real issue came down to HGV testing centres closing down during Covid lockdowns.

Never has there been a stronger argument for someone to delete their Twitter account than in the case of Mr Redwood, who would probably save himself from a lot of embarrassment if he did.

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