Michael Gove with Rishi Sunak, who he is backing to be the Tory leader. Photograph: House of Commons/Jessica Taylor/PA Michael Gove Gove backs Sunak and says Truss is ‘taking holiday from reality’ Former cabinet minister says he does not expect to return to frontbench politics as he backs underdog in race to be PM

Michael Gove has thrown his support behind Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership contest, warning that Liz Truss’s refusal to offer more support over rising energy bills and to just focus on tax cuts marked a “holiday from reality”.

In a sometimes hard-hitting article in the Times, Gove said he did not expect to be made a minister again and that many people expected Truss to win, but he believes Sunak “makes the right arguments”.

Arguing that millions of people and huge numbers of businesses could be financially crippled by high energy costs, Gove wrote that it was vital the new government had a coherent economic plan.

“And here I am deeply concerned that the framing of the leadership debate by many has been a holiday from reality,” he said.

“The answer to the cost of living crisis cannot be simply to reject further ‘handouts’ and cut tax,” he wrote, a reference to Truss’s insistence that she would reduce national insurance and resist most forms of direct help.

“Proposed cuts to national insurance would favour the wealthy, and changes to corporation tax apply to big businesses, not small entrepreneurs. I cannot see how safeguarding the stock options of FTSE 100 executives should ever take precedence over supporting the poorest in our society, but at a time of want, it cannot be the right priority.”

The endorsement of the former communities secretary, a Conservative big hitter who has spent over a decade in the cabinet under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, will be a blow to Truss, even if it is unlikely to revive Sunak’s campaign.

Gove had initially endorsed Kemi Badenoch, with whom he worked in the communities department, but who was knocked out as MPs whittled the field of contenders down to the final two.

Saying Truss, who was a junior minister with him in the education department, is “tenacious, brave and has a huge appetite for policy detail”, Gove said she had also been “admirably clear, consistent and principled in the case she has made” during the leadership race.

He went on: “But I do not think her prospectus is the right answer for the world we face. It does not address the fundamental problems of potential neglected, productivity suppressed and the vulnerable suffering the most.”

“I do not expect to be in government again,” he wrote. “But it was the privilege of my life to spend 11 years in the cabinet under three prime ministers. I know what the job requires. And Rishi has it.”



Source: The Guardian

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