The Conservative party should form an electoral part with Reform UK, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, has said.

According to a report by Amy Gibbons for the Telegraph, Rees-Mogg, who lost his seat at the election, said that there are almost 100 seats won by Labour where Reform UK came second at the election. Rees-Mogg said:

What should we do? Well, let’s for once model ourselves on David Cameron and make a big generous offer …

What if we were to say at the next election, as we did to the liberal unionists, we will not oppose Reform in those 98 seats? I would certainly be open to that as a real opportunity to Reform to win seats from Labour.”

I think it would help us, it will help them. And we will not win if we do not reunite.

All four Tory leadership have said they are focused on winning back voters from Reform UK, rather than doing a deal with Nigel Farage’s party, and so there seems little chance of Rees-Mogg’s idea being adopted in the near future. But a survey of Tory members in July found that more than a third of them were in favour of an electoral pact with Reform UK.

Rees-Mogg is one of the Tories most aligned with Reform UK. He and Farage are both leading presenters on GB News.

This is what Liz Truss said at the Telegraph fringe to explain why she said she thought the Tories would have done better at the election if she had stayed on as leader and PM. (See 12.51pm.)

When asked to explain why she thought she would have done better than Sunak, Truss replied:

Because when I was when I was in No 10, Reform was polling at 3%. By the time we got to the election, I think they got 18% because we promised change that we didn’t deliver.

[Reform UK hit 18% in at least one poll during the campaign, but in the election itself they got 14%.]

Of course, without the support of the parliamentary party, it was very, very difficult for me to get my changes through. And if you have people in the parliamentary party saying ‘It’s Liz Truss’s fault this has happened, not the Bank of London’s fault’, which is what people did and are still doing, it is very difficult for me to deliver that change.

But if the mini-budget had been allowed to succeed, we’d have lower corporation tax, bringing more companies into this country, not relocating to Ireland. We’d have duty free shoppers coming to London, rather than being diverted to Paris or Milan.

We’d have got on with fracking. One of the biggest reasons this country is stagnant is our high energy prices, which are now four times what they are in the United States. By now, fracking would be taking place in Britain, and I think they would have a serious impact with all those competitiveness.

Q: What books would you recommend to turn a young person rightwing?

Truss recommends With No Apologies, Barry Goldwater’s memoir.

Q: Will you try to return to parliament?

Truss says she is still thinking about that.

But she says she is not going to give up on the ideological fight.

Stanley asks the audience if they want her back. They applaud to indicate they do – but not with massive enthusiasm.

Stanley says Truss is being very gloomy. Is there anything she can say to cheer them up.

Truss replies: “Trump might win.”

This gets the first proper round of applause from the audience.

Truss says the left have been winning the arguments globally. She goes on:

Trump winning in America will be a sign that the tide is turning because at present we have Keir Starmer in London, we’ve got socialists in Australia, Canada, America, France, Germany. We need to start turning the tide the other way. And this will be the first domino …

Trump is anti establishment. Yes, the Davos World Economic Forum elite do not like Donald Trump, and I take that as a good sign.

Stanley points out that the US courts don’t like Trump much either. He says he sympathises with her views, but other people will think supporting Trump like this is weird.

Truss says his record in office was a good one.

His foreign policy was much better. He held Iran to account. He took action on Ukraine and Russia in a way that Obama hadn’t. Yes, he was much tougher on China, but domestically, he did all the things that unleashed the American economy, supply side reforms, regulatory reforms, tax cuts, fracking, building oil pipelines. He made the American economy successful, and that is what Biden has been riding off despite some of his poorer economic policies.

Q: Do you think you could have won the election?

Truss says she thinks it would have been very difficult for the Tories to win the election.

I think our best chance of winning would have been to have kept Boris. I think it was a very stupid move by some of my colleagues that undermine Boris, and they still haven’t admitted that.

Q: If you had stayed on and fought the election, do you think you would have done better than Rishi Sunak?

Truss replies: “Yes, I do.”

But, she says, without the support of Tory MPs, it was hard for her to get her changes thought.

And even people in the party were blaming her mini-budget for the problems with the economy.

UPDATE: See 1.41pm for the quote from Truss explaining why she thinks she would have done better than Sunak.

Truss says the key divide in British politics is between people who want change, and people who don’t.

And the Conservative party is divided on this too.

Labour represent the establishment, she says. She says Rachel Reeves used to work for the Bank of England, and Keir Starmer is a former official, as DPP.

She says she lost her seat because Reform UK did very well in her seat. But she does not think people in her seat want a Labour MP. They want change. There were two parties offering change, and Labour came through the middle, she says.

Reform came third in her seat, with 9,958 votes. Truss got 11,217, and the Labour candidate who won got 11,847.

Q: Labour says they need to impose cuts or put up taxes because of your legacy?

Truss says that argument is “economic illiteracy”.

She says taxes were at a 70-year high when she became PM. She tried to change that round, but her mini-budget was not implemented because of opposition from establishment organisations.

She says a Bank of England report earlier this year said two thirds of the spike in the gilt market after the mini-budget was due to the Bank failing to regulate the pensions investment market.

But people do not acknowledge that, he says.

Tim Stanley says he shares Truss’s analysis. But he says many Tories don’t. How do you respond to that.

Truss puts her arms in the air, smiles and says she does not know what to say about the 2017 election (which May messed up). She says she does not want to get into a slanging match with May.

James Cleverly has said The Tories need to stop “behaving like bloody children” in order to win back voters.

At a fringe meeting, he was asked what one policy he would prioritise in order to win back voters.

He replied that earning trust was more important, telling the audience:

The first thing we need to do is win back the trust and support of the voters. We behaved appallingly.

Asked how the party could do this, he replied: “Um, stop behaving like bloody children.”

Liz Truss is about to speak at the Tory conference. Two years ago she was here as PM and party leader. Now she is not even an MP, having lost her South West Norfok seat, where she had a 26,000 majority, in one of Labour’s most dramatic wins on election night.

This is her only scheduled appearance at the Birmingham conference. She is not speaking in the main hall, but she is a fringe organised by the Daily Telegraph where she is being interviewed by Tim Stanley, the Telegraph’s parliamentary sketchwriter.

There was a long queue to get in and the venue, one of the biggest halls in the centre, seating maybe around 400 people, is full.

A prominent businessman has named himself as the source of a £75,000 donation to Robert Jenrick amid transparency concerns over the ultimate origin of the funds, PA Media reports. PA says:

Entrepreneur Phillip Ullmann said he gave the money to the Conservative party leadership frontrunner through Spott Fitness, a fitness coaching app provider which he said is “part of my family’s group of businesses”.

However, Ullmann’s name does not currently appear on the list of people with significant control in Spott Fitness at Companies House, leaving a question mark over his formal links to the organisation.

Labour has demanded an investigation into the origin of the money after Mr Jenrick received three donations of £25,000 from the business in July. [See 8.33am.]

In a statement on Monday, Ullmann said he wanted to avoid suggestions that he is “hiding anything” and insisted he understands the importance of transparency surrounding political donations.

“I’ve been a successful businessman over the years. But in recent times I’ve become concerned about the grave challenges facing the UK and the rest of the world,” he said.

“I tried, unsuccessfully, to make some of that right by changing my businesses into social enterprises. But I’ve come to see that we need huge political change.”

He said he has been “giving to figures of a broadly communitarian bent for several years”, including Labour peer Maurice Glasman, Tory MPs John Hayes and Danny Kruger, the New Conservatives, and the New Social Covenant Unit.

Ullmann added: “I also wanted to back Robert Jenrick whose serious solutions to big challenges – including on migration – appeal to me. I don’t agree with him on everything but broadly we are aligned.

“I chose to give the money from Spott Fitness, a company which is part of my family’s group of businesses. It’s a phenomenal company that’s using tech to improve people’s health and will be a hugely successful business.

“But I don’t want there to be any suggestion at all that I’m hiding anything and I understand the importance of donor transparency. So I’m happy to confirm my connection to Spott. I love my country, I was born and raised in the UK, and have always paid tax and lived here.

“I’m going to continue to set out my ideas for changing the world and our financial system and am always happy to meet with people and set out my ideas in this space.”