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Liz Truss and her mini-Budget left a “very deep and painful scar” on the Conservative Party,Mel Stride said.
The shadow Tory chancellor, who did not serve in the Truss government, made the admission during a lunch with Westminster journalists.
Asked by reporters if the Tories needed to publicly distance themselves from the mini-Budget by apologising and promising it will never happen again, Stride just admitted Truss’s £45bn of unfunded tax cuts severely damaged the party’s reputation.
The MP for Central Devon said: “I think it’s fair to say the-called mini-Budget – on which I had a lot to say at the time – as I was chair of the Treasury select and I was very vocal about what was going on during and after that event – it is a very deep and painful scar on the Conservative Party.”
He said: “At a stroke, it severely damaged that mantle of economic fiscal competence that our party has always [had].”
He added fiscal responsibility has to be at the centre of Conservatives’ plan to move forward.
Truss was ousted from government after serving just 49 days as the prime minister due to the chaos her mini-Budget caused.
She was also kicked out of her seat in the July general election when her majority of 26,195 was wiped out and Labour’s candidate Terry Jermy took her South West Norfolk constituency by 630 votes.
Stride actually managed to hang onto his own seat, although his majority dropped from 16,831 to just 61 votes.
July’s general election led to a historic defeat for the Tories who took just 121 seats in parliament, their worst defeat in terms of constituencies in history.
Asked if the Tories deserved to lose, Stride said: “If the question is – did we do everything right? And really did we deserve to win? Then I don’t think anybody could argue that we did everything right; a very, very long way from it.”
But he claimed Covid, Ukraine and inflation had all impacted the Tory reputation.
The Tory frontbencher added: “We’ve been around for 14 years. And what being around 14 years does is it deprives you the ability to readily recast yourself as an agent of change and so forth.”
He also expressed optimism about his party’s future, saying: “We have a long way to go in order to get back into political contention, but I believe we can do it, because I think that Labour victory last time round whilst wide is relatively shallow, and under 34% of the vote.
“We are in very volatile territory at the moment in which almost anything can happen in the future.”
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