Is Liz Truss a Conservative? Party must make a big decision about the kind of politician who represents its values – Scotsman comment

Calls for Rishi Sunak to deselect Liz Truss as a Conservative candidate – after she appeared on an allegedly “far-right” podcast founded by a former Ukip candidate who previously ‘joked’ about raping an MP – presage a looming battle for the heart and soul of the party.

After the Tories’ expected general election defeat, Sunak will almost certainly stand down as leader. The subsequent leadership contest may tell us much about whether the One Nation party of old still exists, or whether the Conservatives have been entirely captured by their right wing.

Since her disastrous stint as Prime Minister, Truss has embraced conspiracy theorists’ rhetoric about a sinister “deep state” in order to explain her downfall. So the question of whether such a politician is a Conservative could become an emblematic or even an existential one.

Liz Truss speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland (Picture: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

If the answer is no, what would that mean for the future of the Conservatives as a unified force? But if the answer is yes, which seems more likely, will the rump of liberal Tories who survived Boris Johnson’s purges still feel the party is their political home?

Truss’s book Ten Years to Save the West should be filed in fiction section