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By ESTHER WEBBER
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Good Monday morning. This is Esther Webber. Annabelle Dickson will be with you over the next few days.
LOBBY I NEWS: Following the success of his red wall essential reading ‘Broken Heartlands’, the FT’s Sebastian Payne is writing a snap book about the demise of Boris Johnson, in time for Christmas 2022.” The Fall of Boris Johnson’ promises an “inside account of how the Prime Minister lost power” with “all the political betrayals, rivalries and resignations that led to the Tory coup”. Playbook is looking forward to reading it.
LOBBY NEWS II: Ashley Cowburn is leaving the Independent after six years to join the Mirror’s Westminster team as political correspondent next month. Congratulations to him.
DRIVE THE DAY
ATTACK MODE: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak go head-to-head in their first televised debate tonight against a backdrop of bitter blows being exchanged between the two camps. Ahead of the meeting, the two contenders are focusing on each other’s territory, with Sunak hitting Truss’ record in China and Truss targeting Sunak’s free wickets. The intensity of the attacks makes you wonder how they managed to sit around the cabinet table and certainly sets the stage for a must-see at 9pm tonight.
Fanning the fire: Sunak is away on visits to Staffordshire and Milton in Cambridgeshire before the pair meet in Stoke-on-Trent, one of the seats to elect a Tory MP for the first time in a generation in 2019.
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How it will go down: The candidates will take to the podium in front of an audience made up of people from and around Stoke who voted Conservative in 2019, some for the first time, and many of whom are undecided about which party they will get. your vote in the next general election. There will be no opening or closing statements, and presenter Sophie Raworth will open each section of the debate with a question. Candidates will not know the questions until they are asked live. The BBC’s Chris Mason and economics editor Faisal Islam will be on hand to ask some follow-up questions, and Islam’s presence suggests they will be taking a hard look at his tax plans.
Let the spin begin: The two sides are framing the debate very differently. POLITICO’s Annabelle Dickson has an excellent preview of tonight’s showdown, asking whether televised debates can really be game-changers in election and leadership contests. Sunak’s fans are talking up their man’s prospects heading into the bout and believe he has what it takes to upset the contest. An MP tells Annabelle she was “head and shoulders above everyone else” in the previous round of televised debates and that the performance was a “real game-changing moment” to get the crucial support from MPs needed to progress the second round Another Sunak backer told Playbook, “The more he’s out there putting his stall out, the better.”
Cutting it down: On Team Truss, the Foreign Secretary’s allies are already trying to play down the significance of tonight’s clash. A Truss aide dismissed the debates as “probably the biggest lobby bubble obsession I’ve ever come across”. So the bar for her to exceed expectations is set quite a bit lower than it was for the former chancellor. Still, Truss’ team have been preparing diligently over the weekend, with an adviser playing Sunak in a mock debate on Sunday.
Breaking moment? Giles Kenningham, a former aide to David Cameron who has taken part in previous political debates, tells Annabelle: “Sunak needs a big game-changing moment. He needs to go for broke, especially because the window in which he has to changing the minds of this electorate is quite short.” Here’s hoping for some fireworks.
Long-running drama: If tonight’s debate doesn’t do it for you, there’s another one in a minute. There’s a Talk TV and Sun debate tomorrow, the first members of the call-up on Thursday and a Sky News debate next week.
INSIDE THE INFORMATION WARS: The Tories have seen their fair share of information wars in recent years, but the open hostility on display between the two camps ahead of the BBC debate is something else. The candidates’ direct attacks on each other’s records are stinging and relentless as they scramble for buy-in in the crucial first weeks of the summer campaign. After yesterday’s flurry of immigration recriminations was followed by today’s showdown in China, allow Playbook to briefly lift the lid on how this in-tray melee is playing out. entry of the country’s journalists.
10.28am: Liz for Leader issues a 700-word press release outlining its plans for new “investment zones” where lower taxes and reduced planning restrictions will apply. Not content to stop there, the campaign promises it will create “fat free ports” by “untethering pre-existing free ports from excessive Whitehall bureaucracy”, a direct attack on the scheme’s Sunak administration current Truss hammers home the point, saying: “We cannot continue to allow Whitehall to pick winners and losers; as we have seen with the current free port model”.
12.31pm: Ready4Rishi sends out an 800-word press release in which Sunak has “declared” that China and the Chinese Communist Party “pose the greatest threat to Britain and the security and prosperity of the world this century” . He proposes banning the UK’s Confucius Institutes, some of which his team points out Truss helped open as education minister, and takes a swipe at Truss, saying: “For too long, Britain’s politicians and the West have rolled out the red carpet and turned a blind eye to China’s nefarious activity and ambitions.”
4.22pm: Liz for Leader sends a 600-word rebuttal to Sunak’s press release on China, with Iain Duncan Smith describing his intervention as “astounding” and asking: “Where have you been for the last two years?” Accompanying notes describe Sunak as “soft on China” and claim that the China Global Times has “effectively endorsed” him as prime minister.
10.30pm: A defense of Truss’s position on China in the Cabinet appears in the Times and Telegraph.
11.05 pm: Team Rishi contests its defense.
The fun doesn’t stop there: a single comprehensive school has probably never received as much attention as Roundhay in Leeds since Truss claimed that at his alma mater he saw “children who [were] it failed and they were let down by low expectations.”Many have questioned his characterization, with Sunak’s backers noting that the school was highly ranked compared to others in the same local education authority at the time. A member of Sunak’s campaign said: “Liz Truss should not be rewriting history, especially when it comes to education. His baseless allegations against his old school are almost as ridiculous as his baseless evidence of tax cuts.”
To Team Truss: One Truss supporter responded that he “will not take lectures on education standards from an LA-based Goldman Sachs banker who went to a school for the uber-elite.” They added: “This childish nonsense has no place in a leadership race. Liz’s team will be talking to Rishi’s team to make sure this contest remains a battle of ideas, not a mudslinging match.” Good luck, as they say, with that.
Taking a step back: We’ve all grown accustomed to blue-on-blue attacks during the Brexit years, and the two most recent leadership contests weren’t exactly saintly throughout. But the mud being thrown in all directions right now, not just in informal briefings but in approved press releases, looks more like what you’d expect the Conservatives to run in, say, the Labor Party, rather than ‘a former colleague.
Damage done: Against this backdrop, many in the party are worried that the war of words could cause lasting damage, just as they hoped a new leader could help rebuild the Conservative brand. Salma Shah, a former aide to Sajid Javid, told the BBC at Westminster yesterday: “There will be an election in a very short time and to be able to foster that sense of mission and purpose after such a heated debate. —I think it will be difficult
Conservatives in disarray: A party campaigner told Playbook: “I don’t see how any of this is going to help the party come together at the end of this. My understanding is that they want the most ridiculous policies announced right before the polls for members to be fresh in their minds, but the information that Liz is on the side of human rights lawyers will remain if she wins.” A minister who takes a more optimistic view acknowledged: “Both sides think that the other’s policies could be politically or economically ruinous, which is difficult to unite.”
In the Gap: Who would want to get involved in this mess? Well, at least one more person. Playbook hears that Iain Carter, former political director of the Conservative Party and now a partner at Hanbury Strategy, has taken unpaid leave from the firm to join Liz Truss’s campaign as strategy director.
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