Johnson rival Liz Truss should be more careful with taxpayers’ money

Editorial: Truss’s private jet flight to Australia cost the taxpayer at least £500,000 – this is embarrassing on a number of grounds

Truss’s flight was enormously polluting, even by aviation standards – approaching 500 tonnes of CO2 (PA Wire)

The story that the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, flew by official private jet to Australia at a cost of at least half a million pounds to the Exchequer, rather than via scheduled business class flights, is embarrassing on a number of grounds – and indicative of a certain sense of entitlement that extends further than the Cabinet Office and No 10.

The timing, for example, is hardly ideal, given that a shadowy campaign group, rallying under the slogan “In Liz We Truss”, is trying to sell the foreign secretary as some kind of reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher.

Mrs Thatcher certainly had her regal, imperious, entitled side, particularly towards the end of her time as premier and party leader, but the grocer’s daughter’s devotion to “housewife economics” and financial probity was legendary. Ms Truss does seem rather profligate by comparison, at a time when the national debt and borrowing stands at record levels, and her principal rival, Rishi Sunak is trying to put public finances on a sustainable footing.