The final TV debate between the five candidates in the Tory leadership contest, which was supposed to take place on Sky TV on Monday, was called off after Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, and the foreign secretary Liz Truss refused to take part. They were involved in acrimonious exchanges in a debate on ITV on Sunday evening. On Monday evening 358 Tory MPs were engaged in the third round of voting which will reduce the number of candidates to four.

There will be another round on Tuesday and the final on Wednesday which will determine which two candidates go through to a postal vote by Tory party members, whose numbers are estimated to be between 160,000 and 180,000. The two most influential Right-leaning newspapers, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, are backing Truss and doing their best to derail Sunak’s campaign. The Sunday Telegraph, for example, had a big picture of Truss on page one and a huge one inside. She was given pride of place to promote her leadership credentials, while Sunak merited a small, single-column head and shoulders image.

In the ITV debate, Sunak hit back at those who say that a millionaire with a non-dom wife, Akshata Murty — she is the daughter of Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy — cannot understand the struggles of ordinary people. He said: “There is a commentary about my wife’s family’s wealth. And so let me just address that head-on. Because I think it’s worth doing because I’m actually incredibly proud of what my parents-inlaw built. My father-in-law came from absolutely nothing. Just had a dream and a couple of hundred pounds that my mother-in-law’s savings provided him. And with that, he went on to build one of the world’s largest, most respected, most successful companies that, by the way, employs thousands of people here in the United Kingdom. It’s an incredibly conservative story.

Actually, it’s a story that I’m really proud of. And as Prime Minister, I want to ensure that we can create more stories like this here at home.” Truss, who wants to cut taxes, blamed the recession Britain is expected to experience on Sunak’s handling of the economy. “It is cutting back on growth,” she said. “It is preventing companies from investing and it’s taking money out of people’s pockets. That is no way to get the economy going during a recession.” Sunak, who wants to contrail inflation first, accused her of economic illiteracy: “I’d love to stand here and say, ‘Look, I’ll cut this tax, that tax and another tax and it will all be OK.’ But you know what? It won’t.” He drove home his point: “There’s a cost to these things and the cost of higher inflation, higher mortgage rates, eroded savings. And you know what? This something-for-nothing economics isn’t Conservative. It’s socialism.”

Truss, who now supports Brexit, had campaigned to remain in the EU during the referendum in 2016. Sunak asked her: “Liz, in your past, you’ve been both a Liberal Democrat and a Remainer. I was just wondering which one you regretted most?” Truss had a jibe at Sunak who was educated at Winchester and Oxford before going to Stanford where he met his wife. She said: “I am somebody who was not born into the Conservative Party. I went to school in Paisley and Leeds, I went to a comprehensive school. My parents were Leftwing activists and I’ve been on a political journey ever since. “But my fundamental belief, and the reason I am a Conservative, is I saw kids at my school being let down in Leeds, I saw them not get the opportunities, not get the proper educational standards that you might have got at your school, Rishi. “I saw them wasted, having wasted potential, and I thought that waste was wrong.”