The race to replace Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party and therefore Prime Minister has quickly become a Rorschach test designed to discover the various ways in which British Tories are miserable.
In Rishi Sunak, the former finance minister, Conservative party members see a man who was disloyal to Johnson by leading the exodus of cabinet officials that ultimately led to Johnson’s downfall earlier this month. Worse, they see him as disloyal to the principles of what it means to be conservative. In Liz Truss, the acting Foreign Secretary, they see a decaffeinated Margaret Thatcher who will do anything to gain power.
Polls suggest that either of them would lose the next general election.
Rishi Sunak arrives at the Science Museum to attend a cabinet meeting on the sidelines of the Global Investment Summit in London on October 19, 2021.
OLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty
Britain’s ruling party reached this unfortunate ultimatum when Boris Johnson inadvertently set off the launch of a new leadership race when he shot himself in the foot over the latest sex-assault scandal to bedevil the party. His mishandling gave Johnson’s Tory colleagues the perfect excuse to tell him to go for decency, claiming that their sudden loss of patience with him had nothing to do with the results of the recent elections, which showed that his party might be on the way. on the opposition benches at Westminster if he was still in charge at the next general election.
Johnson became the latest victim of a conservative tradition: ousting one’s own leader while in government. Now the UK will need a new Prime Minister. You would think that such a vital democratic question would be answered by the British people in a general election, but no. Instead, for the third time since 2016, an estimated 200,000 card-carrying members of the Conservative Party will decide who has the unchecked power to govern Britain’s 67 million people.
Conservative MPs have already whittled down an initial field of nine potential leaders to just two. Sunak and Truss will hit the road, campaigning across the country and taking part in televised debates before one is crowned leader on September 5.
The infighting between the wider field of candidates in the first debates was so bad that party elders canceled the final debate so the rest of the country couldn’t watch the Tories tear apart and shred their record of power in live on television. There are hopes, but no guarantees, that the end-to-end version will produce fewer fireworks.
The problem is that most conservative lawmakers and party members are far from thrilled with the latter two, or even with the way the candidates were chosen.
“This particular contest has been nasty, vicious, personal and has nothing to do with policy,” says John Strafford, president of the Campaign for Conservative Democracy, a grassroots organization that aims to make the party more democratic. “Policies have been pushed aside, so all these personal ego trips that MPs go on have come to the fore. It’s an absolute disgrace. It’s a travesty of democracy.” The 80-year-old party veteran, who has been a Conservative member since 1964, says he would not vote for either Truss or Sunak. But he has no love lost for Johnson, who Strafford considers “the worst Conservative leader of my life.”
Just a few months ago, megabucks Sunak was a national hate figure. His support in the polls plummeted when it emerged that he held an American green card — essentially declaring himself a permanent resident of the United States for tax purposes — even while serving as the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and, uh, it raised everyone else’s taxes. It also emerged that his wife, who has an estimated $835 million stake in her billionaire father’s company, claimed special tax status for British residents whose permanent home is abroad.
Left: Margaret Thatcher; Right: Liz Truss
Photo illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/No. 10
And Truss is certainly not without its drawbacks. He has been seen in some parts of the party and the public as insubstantial, and has accumulated his own embarrassments of self-sabotage. In January, he had to admit he spent an indefensible $600,000 of public money on a private jet trip to Australia. And he has also been called out repeatedly for deliberately trying to emulate Tory heroine Margaret Thatcher in an inappropriate campaign and years of photo shoots. (Mind you, Sunak’s pictures have also caused quite a stir — it’s hard to understand how short he really is (5-foot-6) until you see him next to another human being.)
A video of Truss giving an atrocious speech at the 2014 party convention has also gone viral to no end during the leadership campaign. “Truss knows nothing about economics,” one former Tory minister told The Daily Beast. “She’s completely weird and weird. I think she would be totally out of her depth.”
Reports have also appeared in the British press accusing Truss of deliberately leaking documents to the press designed to embarrass his opponents during the leadership race. Some party figures are concerned that Truss will be able to appeal enough to Tory members to win the race, but then lead the Tories to ruin in the expected general election in 2024. “The question is whether Sunak can cut through and attract enough members or if, in his easy way, Truss can succeed, and we end up with an absolute five-star disaster,” said one veteran lawmaker. “It’s pretty sad. I think we’re heading into opposition at this rate.”
Incredibly, there is even a contingent of Conservative MPs and MPs who oppose both Truss and Sunak because they believe the best person to be the next Conservative leader and Prime Minister is Boris Johnson. “There has been almost a coup to get rid of Boris,” Tory lawmaker Michael Fabricant told The Daily Beast. The staunch Johnson supporter says he believes Britons are frustrated that the Tory party has become “like lemmings jumping off a cliff”. Why do we do that instead of continuing to run the country? He is completely self-indulgent.” Fabricant is supporting Truss because he dislikes Sunak, informed in part by what Fabricant calls “the loyalty problem,” namely Sunak’s betrayal of Johnson.
However, if the polls are to be believed, Sunak appears to be less popular with Tory members than Truss, partly because of his policies, which some say are not conservative enough. His critics have attacked his record as UK Chancellor or Chancellor of the Exchequer. Truss likes to point out that, on his watch, the tax burden is the highest it has been in 70 years. Government borrowing also exploded as economic activity collapsed during the COVID lockdowns. Worse still for Sunak’s confidence in Downing Street, he is the only leadership candidate who has refused to promise tax cuts if he becomes prime minister. Thank the gentleman who voted for Brexit in 2016, unlike Truss, who would otherwise be totally at odds with Tory sentiment, according to the received wisdom. Although even on Brexit, Truss seems to be favored by hard Eurosceptics since she did a complete 180 on her former pro-European stance.
“The person with the real understanding of the politics that was the class act in a way was Rishi,” says Lord Henry Bellingham, a former Tory MP who is now in the House of Lords, speaking the morning after seeing Sunak and Truss compete for support. in a search for conservative gentlemen. “I think Rishi’s big problem is that he is the chancellor who is presiding over some pretty big tax increases. He has explained to us exactly why he has had to do that, and he has also made it very clear that he is instinctively a low-tax Conservative , but that has some way to go. [prove] this.” Bellingham, who will be voting for Truss, adds: “I think Liz will win because she has more support among the party faithful. On the other hand, if these polls of the general public indicate that Rishi is more likely to win the election in fight against [Labour leader Keir] Starmer is more likely to save the UK in terms of challenge [Scottish First Minister Nicola] Sturgeon, then I think that will be a factor.”
Even with Truss ahead for now, there is still a lot to play for before the September result. Just look at how much damage the Conservative Party does in the process of getting there. As one former minister puts it, the general electorate is not so impressed with the “cheap and superficial judgments” used in the race about who is and isn’t a real Tory, while the country faces a series of truly monumental challenges. .
“I mean, we’ve gotten to the point where people are saying, ‘Shit, there are much bigger problems,'” says the conservative source. “We’ve got a global commodity crisis, we’ve got the war on Ukraine, we have social deprivation and people can’t pay their bills. These narrow judgments are designed only to appeal to factions in the Conservative party and are potentially disastrous for the ruling party.”