Nothing suggests that Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak fully understand the country’s most besetting problems, let alone how to fix them
In this Tory leadership contest, there has been a vogue for catching out candidates with things they once said: Liz Truss calling for a republic back in the days when she was a Liberal Democrat or a young Rishi Sunak boasting that he didn’t have any working-class friends. But it won’t be long before whoever wins is caught out by the things they didn’t say at all. We’ve heard more than enough about the differences between the two on tax and inflation but there has been a conspiracy of silence on some of the biggest problems facing this country, as though both contenders either don’t want to know how bad things are or know that they don’t have the mettle to solve them.
Both have fought furiously over whether their economic plan will help Britons avoid an extremely expensive and miserable winter. But beyond bickering about their tinkering to help with the cost of energy bills, neither Truss nor Sunak has confronted the underlying problems that Britain has with its energy supply that make it more vulnerable should Vladimir Putin decide not to turn the gas back on. The impact of the war in Ukraine on fuel prices is something no prime minister can really control but the government and both leadership contenders are also shirking the things they can control. There has been no discussion of an emergency plan to deal with energy supply or energy demand. Britain’s housing stock is leakier than a sieve, which means the heating people can afford quickly escapes through the walls of their homes. We are still building properties that are sufficiently energy inefficient to need retro-fitting in the same way as homes built in the 1960s and 1970s. However old or new our homes are, they need a national programme of insulation.