Hoopla around Truss and Rayner shows Michael Ashcroft still steering the debate

If this week’s tetchy exchanges between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak at prime minister’s questions proved one thing, it was the ability of the veteran businessman, donor and publisher Michael Ashcroft to set the political agenda.

Having made billions buying and selling companies in areas as diverse as cleaning services, car auctions and office security, he began ploughing money into the party in the 1990s.

The political journalist Peter Oborne called him “the man who bought the Tory party”, as he used his clout and expensive polling to help shape its electoral strategy.

This week, Ashcroft released a poll showing that voters now trust Labour more than the Conservatives on every major issue, including the traditional Tory strong points of tax, Brexit and defence.

In recent years he has written largely positive biographies of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rishi Sunak, but a far more scathing one about Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie, which depicted her as a powerful and sometimes manipulative figure in Downing Street.

This week the publisher said it would delete a sentence in Truss’s book in which she falsely attributed to the Jewish banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild a quote about the desire to “issue and control the money of a nation”.