Rishi Sunak’s Commons majority in peril as 60 Tories join Liz Truss group

Sixty Conservative MPs have joined Liz Truss’s Growth Group, imperilling the government’s majority in parliament, as Rishi Sunak was warned by former cabinet ministers “we cannot accept the status quo”.

At a packed fringe meeting during Conservative party conference, Truss and her supporters held a rally where they pushed for the chancellor to cut corporation tax, build 500,000 new homes and resume fracking to cut energy bills.

Truss made her only public appearance during the gathering of activists in Manchester to suggest the Conservatives were no longer the party of business. She argued the state had become too big, with taxes and spending unsustainably high.

Despite resigning from office nearly a year ago after her disastrous mini-budget, Truss showed no signs of contrition, saying Sunak should be willing to take tough decisions to help grow the economy even if they were unpopular.

Sunak was told by another former disaffected cabinet minister, Ranil Jayawardena, that the Conservative Growth Group of Truss’s allies had grown in size to include 60 MPs – the same size as the government’s majority in the Commons.

Jayawardena called for stamp duty to be scrapped on people’s principal homes, while Jacob Rees-Mogg also argued that what he called the “pernicious” inheritance tax should be scrapped.

The former home secretary Priti Patel said: “We cannot be timid any more, we cannot be risk averse and we cannot accept the status quo.”

It piles pressure on Sunak and his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, before the king’s speech and autumn statement in November. Hunt acknowledged in his conference speech that “the level of tax is too high”, though added he was focused on tackling the “long-term” challenge of inflation first.

Despite more than 30 Tory MPs last week signing a pledge to vote against any moves to raise the tax burden, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank said the chance for tax cuts was “very remote”.

“I don’t think there is space for tax cuts, unless we can think of some pretty radical ways,” Johnson told the Guardian at another conference fringe event in Manchester.

“It’s not just the immediate pressures that we’re seeing in public finances, but we know that we’re going to be needing to spend more on health and pensions, social care and everything going forward as a result of demographic change. So I think the chances of tax cuts are very remote.”