LIZ TRUSS can stow her battle axe and put her feet up.
Rishi Sunak WILL cut taxes — and, unlike her own rash splurge, it will not crash the economy.
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party may be down but they’re not out
That won’t stop our flash-in-the-pan former PM trying to hijack the Tory conference where her own premiership crashed and burned last year.
She will use a fringe meeting in Manchester to justify her well-intentioned but half-baked budget, which slashed taxes without the cash to pay for them.
Her real purpose, aided and abetted by Boris Johnson’s unforgiving fans, is to skewer the man who succeeded both of them.
A few other Tory malcontents — “The Green Crap Club” — will blast Rishi for betraying their bonkers plans to make poor people poorer.
They are wasting their breath.
Nothing rallies restless Tories more than the merest whiff of a possibility of maybe winning the next election.
Yesterday’s Opinium poll shows Labour’s average 20-point lead sliced in half.
It may be just a straw in the wind.
But voters are now listening to the Conservatives again on people-traffickers, the money-grabbing war on motorists and the stampede for net zero.
Equally, they are appalled by Keir Starmer’s promise to effectively rejoin the EU and surrender control of mass illegal immigration to Brussels.
If that ten-point lead sticks, it places the Tories within range of the most sensational election upset since John Major squashed Neil Kinnock in 1992.
And this is after only a couple of true blue Tory announcements.
There are more to come this week in Manchester.
And despite Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s bashful denials, there will be significant tax cuts in his March Budget.
The Treasury has been ordered to assess all options — inheritance tax, VAT cuts, capital gains.
But it is also looking at Stamp Duty, the reforms of which were an unforgivable act of economic vandalism by former Chancellor George Osborne.
Let’s hope Rishi slashes this drag anchor, liberates the crippled housing market, unleashes job mobility — and gives people freedom to live where they want.
These plans, along with school reforms, an NHS shake-up and getting people off welfare and back to work, are all crucial parts of Rishi’s vow to “change this country for the better”.
For millions of voters of all parties and all ethnic back- grounds, immigration remains the biggest issue of all.
With millions on the move across Africa, it was no exaggeration for Home Secretary Suella Braverman to describe this crisis as “existential — a threat to the Western way of life”.
Voters’ outrage
Crucially, her speech in America was vetted by Downing Street — including plans to quit the European Convention on Human Rights if Britain is barred by the Supreme Court or by unelected Strasbourg judges from flying illegals to Rwanda.
I was reminded twice last week of Rishi’s first pledge as PM: “I will do whatever it takes to stop the boats.”
He believes the EU is finally responding to voters’ outrage across Europe over its failure to guard their security — and following Britain’s lead on deportation.
This landmine issue is lethal for Labour and is already exploding under Starmer’s feet.
Yet he has stupidly offered to surrender to Brussels the right to decide just how many illegals come to the UK.
“By doing what Starmer wants, we shift our borders from the Kent coast to North Africa,” says a Tory source.
Nor is Suella alone in criticising “multiculturalism” as a blight on assimilation and racial harmony.
Labour ex-Cabinet ministers Ed Miliband and David Blunkett have criticised Tony Blair’s 2004 decision to throw open UK borders.
Ex-Home Secretary Jack Straw called it a “spectacular mistake”.
Race equality champ-ion Sir Trevor Phillips, a former Labour politician, once slammed multiculturalism as a “racket” and warned Britain risked “sleepwalking to segregation”.
Silence on the issue contributed to child grooming scandals in cities such as Rotherham and Rochdale, because authorities “turned a blind eye”, he said in 2015.
No fan of Suella’s political style, he used his column in The Times last week to slam her critics: “The phrasing of reporters’ questions . . . ‘How does this square with your being the child of immigrants?’, stinks of patronising bigotry, as though being a person of colour should imprison your mind as well your body,” he wrote.
“Perhaps Braverman’s critics need to take a few steps in her shoes before they have a go.”
Oh Lord…
ARCHBISHOP Justin Welby is miffed that Suella Braverman has snubbed his summons to a chat about immigration and Rwanda.
Why should she waste her time on this mitred pygmy?
On his ten-year watch, this happy-clappy cleric has presided over a collapse in church-going by 15 per cent and a fall of almost as much in the number claiming to be Christians.
“That, personally, I count as failure,” he confesses.
Welby claims to speak with the voice of God, but he should steer clear of hot politics unless he wants to risk losing the absurd anomaly of voting rights for 26 bishops in the House of Lords.
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