Liz Truss contests ‘£12,000’ invoice referring to her use of grace-and-favour house
Liz Truss is disputing a invoice she has been requested to pay referring to a rustic home which she had use of as international secretary.
The invoice is reportedly for £12,000 however the former prime minister’s spokesman claims the precise determine is decrease.
The bill, first reported in The Mail on Sunday, covers the interval in August 2022 when she used Chevening House in Kent, in the course of the time she was working to be Conservative chief earlier than being elected to No 10 the next month.
Ms Truss claims many of the bill pertains to utilizing the grace-and-favour house for presidency enterprise and she or he maintains she shouldn’t be liable for almost all of it.
The then international secretary met three Baltic international ministers at Chevening House in October 2021
The official enterprise included conferences with cupboard secretary Simon Case once they had been planning a transition to a Truss authorities.
If she did pay, there would have been a breach of civil service protocol as a result of civil servants aren’t allowed to just accept hospitality from a politician, her group argues.
Ms Truss has requested for this half to be billed individually.
She pays for private prices referring to friends. The invoice reportedly consists of lacking gadgets together with bathrobes, which she is pleased to exchange.
A spokesman for Ms Truss mentioned: “Liz at all times paid for the prices of her private friends at Chevening.
“The latest invoice contains a mixture of costs for her personally and costs for official government business with civil servants including Simon Case and senior officials from other departments who met at Chevening during the transition preparations.
“The latter constitutes nearly all of the invoice. It could be inappropriate for her to pay the prices for officers as it could have breached the civil service code for civil servants to just accept hospitality in the course of the management marketing campaign.
“She has therefore asked for this to be billed separately.”
Chevening House, which has 115 rooms and is Grade 1 listed, was left to the nation by the seventh Earl Stanhope after he died in 1967.
Since then, the prime minister of the day has determined who makes use of it, with that individual normally being the international secretary.
Liz Truss’s rise and fall
Ms Truss was the shortest-serving prime minister in UK historical past, resigning final October, simply 44 days after taking on from Boris Johnson.
It got here after her tax-cutting mini-budget spooked monetary markets.
She has mentioned she was never given a “realistic chance” to implement her radical tax-cutting agenda and blamed what she known as a “powerful economic establishment” for eradicating her from Downing Street.