Liz Truss will assemble her acolytes for a “growth rally” intended to show Rishi Sunak she will keep pushing for the policies she tried to enact during her 49-day premiership. Though the former prime minister faced humiliation at last year’s Conservative party conference, she will not shy away from the limelight when activists and MPs gather in Manchester this week. Truss and three disaffected former cabinet ministers – Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel and Ranil Jayawardena – will host the “Great British growth rally” to push for a plan to “make Britain grow again”. In an attempt to pile pressure on Sunak, the group will urge him to be bold and tackle the UK’s low-growth “crisis” at an event in the Midland hotel on Monday on the fringes of conference. It is Truss’s only public event at the conference and part of a wider effort by the former prime minister to rehabilitate her reputation. Since leaving office, she has argued that her ideas were sound but implemented too quickly and resisted by MPs and the “economic establishment”. The Guardian understands that over the past six months Truss has been seeking to play a more subtle role in influencing the future of the Conservative party. Truss hosted networking drinks at her favoured private members’ club, 5 Hertford Street, for those she sees as up and coming in the Conservative party. Organisers described it as a chance to “get to know others on the circuit”, but attenders believe that Truss’s intention is to groom the next generation of Tory MPs. A dinner and “teach-in” was held at the Delaunay, a high-end central London restaurant, where Brandon Lewis and several of those MPs close to Truss shared tips on getting selected as a Conservative candidate. People familiar with Truss’s thinking said she recognised she was unpopular in the Conservative parliamentary party and so had turned her focus to those standing for election to join it. They said she believed the party had become fragmented into different caucuses and she wanted to engender growth as a unifying mission for future Tory MPs. “Liz is not expecting an immediate return on investment,” said one source. “But she thinks that if you put in enough time with enough people, you’ll drag the general impression of the party in one direction.” Another said: “She sees this as a project for the rest of her working life.” Truss plans to launch her first book since leaving Downing Street, titled Ten Years to Save the West, in April. Colleagues said she had already discussed the possibility of another, imagined as a “Britannia Unchained 2.0”, in reference to the collection of essays she co-authored in 2012 that offered “global lessons for growth and prosperity”. Truss’s allies said the networking drinks were not a regular occurrence and she had a wide range of friends and contacts in the party whom it was natural to meet with. They said she was keen to help the Conservative party win the next and future elections. Since resigning last year, becoming Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, Truss has kept a relatively low public profile. The Conservative conference in 2022 fell about 10 days after the mini-budget. Truss became buffeted when Tory MPs began expressing serious reservations about some measures, prompting a public row between her cabinet at conference. A nervous reaction by the markets over her and Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts led the pair to junk one of their most controversial measures, the abolition of the 45p top rate of income tax. Further U-turns were quickly adopted and she later sacked her chancellor in a failed attempt to shore up her own position.