Today's insults will damage the Tory party of tomorrow

Despite all the talk of coming together when this is over, and how much Liz Truss prefers Rishi Sunak to Keir Starmer, it seems that the candidates and their supporters cannot help themselves.

- JOHN RENTOUL

In Cheltenham on Thursday, Sunak said Truss's plans would "leave millions of incredibly vulnerable people at the risk of real destitution".

The next day, when the new GDP figures were published, Truss put out a statement implying that it was Sunak who was responsible as chancellor for the "shrinking of the UK economy".

Every time a leading Tory urges restraint, journalists and Labour MPs, none of whom can believe their luck, fear that their fun has come to an end and that the remaining weeks of the campaign will be conducted with elaborate politeness. After all, most of the votes that will be cast have probably been cast by now, and it is not as if insults ever change people's minds, except to turn them against the insulter.

But the restraint of self-preservation appears to have been cast aside. Sometimes the voices urging the campaigns to dilute the vitriol are dignified grandees from the party's past - although Nigel Lawson could not resist instead a touch of Lloyd Bentsen with his "I served with Margaret Thatcher" article, aimed at Truss.

Sometimes the voices are current cabinet ministers, such as Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury, who took his cabinet colleague Dominic Raab to task for his "electoral suicide" comment about Truss's plans for tax cuts. That was the day before Clarke wrote a joint article with Kwasi Kwarteng, in which they told tales out of school (and contrary to the ministerial code) about what Sunak had said in cabinet, and accused him of having "given up" by adopting a "Labour-lite economic policy".