Ben Houchen rules out standing for Tory leader in the future

Lord Houchen, who is currently the most powerful elected Conservative in the country, was asked by Laura Kuenssberg if he would like to follow the same path.

The Mayor of Tees Valley replied: “It’s not really for me, my job is the one that I’ve got - it’s a dream job for me.”

Lord Houchen said he hoped a new Tory leader would be in place by early October at the latest, after speculation the contest could run until Christmas.

“If we navel gaze for too long that’s going to turn off the public even more because it feeds into the perception that we’re more concerned with the ongoings of the Conservative Party rather than what the public care about,” he explained.

Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Suella Braverman are amongst the likely contenders. Lord Houchen said he had spoken to a number of leadership hopefuls and would meet them in person “to discuss their intentions”.

The Mayor of Tees Valley said his party had “lost the election last week because of the perception in the public that we had lost all competence to be able to run effective government”.

He added: “We lost the trust of the British people, and that was a long tale of U-turns, of infighting, of changing Prime Ministers.

“I hope that the Conservative Party learns that lesson, rather than the lesson that some suggested we need to learn from the election, which is that we need to lurch more to the left or the right.

“That completely misses the point … we could have had the best manifesto in the world but we still would have lost this election.”

One of those Prime Ministers, Liz Truss, has said Rishi Sunak’s decision to “trash my reputation” contributed to the scale of the election defeat.

Ms Truss, who lost her seat in South West Norfolk to Labour, said her successor had abandoned “conservative principles” during his premiership.

In her first public intervention since the results of the General Election, Ms Truss insisted she had attempted to take on the status quo – which she described as “Blairite economic orthodoxy” – with her short-lived, tax-cutting agenda.

She claimed that the gambling scandal which engulfed the Tories mid-campaign had contributed to a lack of enthusiasm on the doorstep, as had Mr Sunak “repeating the mantra of stop the boats while presiding over record immigration”.

She also said her Conservative predecessors as prime minister did not do enough to push back against a “Leftist agenda”, including on issues like net zero and gender self-identification.

The former Prime Minister suggested the public will not stick with Labour, as the party has “no agenda to reduce taxes or deregulate or dismantle the bloated Whitehall bureaucracy”.