Truss and Sunak compete to win Red Wall Tories

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have just finished their most cynical hustings of the Tory leadership contest so far. The pair were addressing a party audience in Darlington, and had tailored their stump speeches and answers to a ‘Red Wall’ audience. The picture that these answers painted of what both think of Red Wall Tories was fascinating: both of them wanted to talk as much about the importance of recognising biological sex as they did about the cost of living, with Truss telling the audience that as a ‘straight-talking Yorkshire woman, I know that a woman is a woman’. Sunak took aim at ‘this lefty woke culture, that seems to want to cancel our histories, our values and our women’, later joking to a member of the audience who had asked for a ‘man to man explanation’ of what levelling up was that ‘it’s a good thing you didn’t say person to person’.