Rishi Sunak enters the last weeks of this leadership contest fighting on three fronts: over his tax hikes, with those who think he’s been disloyal and against Liz Truss. Many of the 200,000 Tory members will send their postal votes from early August. Time is against him.
It does not mean the battle is over. We have seen members return very different views on any given day. Penny Mordaunt was their clear favourite, then Kemi Badenoch. Last night a YouGov poll went in Truss’s direction, after her posturing as the candidate for tax cuts. These members are on the hunt for something new and exciting.
It makes it impossible to predict who they will finally settle on. Everyone I know right now is saying it will be Truss, but last week it was all about Mordaunt. Monday’s BBC debate and the polls of the voting public will be important — over 50 per cent of members agree winning the next election is the priority. The ideological battle lines are now at least clear: Sunak is promoting fiscal responsibility — tackle inflation first, with tax cuts to come later. Truss yesterday doubled down on big tax cuts from day one, claiming Tory economic policy for 20 years has been wrong, as was everyone who supported it. Tax cuts, Truss claimed confidently, will fuel growth. Job done.
It sounds too good to be true because it is. It is also politically savvy. Her plan is to bet on creating enough feel-good momentum to carry her to a win before doubts about this sunlit land she is describing start to creep in. Because it is seductive, isn’t it, to believe two decades of low growth are quickly fixed? We are fed up with being taxed. Who isn’t? Her pitch is anti-austerity and she’s sold it like Brexit: don’t believe the experts or the establishment (read: suited plutocrat Sunak and his socialist tax-rising Treasury).
Many will believe her. I’m afraid I don’t — I wish I did. If growth was this easily conjured, driven solely by a ferocious tax-cutting, deregulating agenda, why haven’t successive governments performed the same magic trick? And if that growth doesn’t materialise, how is she paying for those tax cuts? With much more spending. Are we to believe there have been simpletons in the Tory Treasury to date?
In 2017, Truss was already planning her ascendancy to the big job. At the time, she visited a colleague of mine to discuss her candidacy plans. I wonder if she described then this great economic vision of hers? Because I reckon she saw an opportunity and rustled up this new sales pitch in the last week.
It is why sugar-coated empty promises should rightly continue to be Sunak’s rebuttal. Truss, the shape-shifting profligate storyteller. Tax cuts here, giveaways there, and miraculous growth everywhere. She said yesterday she’s not Margaret Thatcher, she’s her own person. But I fear Truss is a politician who will pander to any opinion, any wish list, as long it gets her into Number 10. Elements of the party (and media) are using her and she them.
Once a Lib Dem, then a Remainer, and more recently months dressing up as Margaret Thatcher, holding Fizz with Liz meetings, while tweeting she is 100 per cent behind Boris Johnson. It is Sunak who voted Brexit. Truss has only recently donned the mantle of the Tory party’s fervent Right. That video footage of young Truss talking down the monarchy to the Lib Dems showed one thing: naked ambition. I like ambition, I admire hers; ambition is needed by women working in Westminster. I think she’s smart. But how can I trust her? Because integrity is vital. I admire people who are true to their core values and beliefs, who take difficult decisions even when they are unpopular. Recent polling says the members do too.
Sunak has pointed out that this is not the time to cut taxes and has appealed to the traditional Tory value of sound money. These are the Tories I grew up with.
Sunak’s mountain to climb is that hard truths are not sexy. Money immediately in your pocket is. He must present his own plan for growth, a clear argument for sorting out our labour market and yes, how he will cut taxes. Tories consider the rise to National Insurance a mistake. It broke a manifesto pledge and hit ordinary workers, even while it lifted the poorest out of it with the biggest tax giveaway in a decade. So he must tackle trust issues of a different nature.
It’s going to be a long, few weeks.
Whoever wins this race must beware of a tilt to the Right
Many red wall seats will fall, whoever the members choose — they voted against Corbyn, more than for Boris Johnson. And Brexit is done. This is according to Tory MP Jake Berry, the influential leader of the Northern Research Group of MPs. If he is right, the big battleground will be the South-East, where the Lib Dems could hoover up Tory seats to Labour’s advantage. I fear any further pitch to the Right of the party could ultimately lose the next election; the Tories need those moderate seats and many feel abandoned by Johnson and his constant throwing of meat to the North. I can’t help thinking Steve Baker’s comment that Truss has gone on the journey we all need to take, from Remainer to Brexit ‘Hardwoman’, will ultimately be an election turn-off.
Trump never hesitated to stoop lower
If there was ever proof that narcissistic demagogue leaders are to be avoided at all costs, then the discovery that Donald Trump sat watching the raids on Capitol Hill on Fox News, while ignoring all pleas to call off his supporters by his aides and family, while he carried on tweeting that the election was stolen, should be a final warning.
It is staggering now to think that this was the behaviour of the President of the United States. Lost in a make-believe world of his own making to such an extent he was happy to see the very foundations of American democracy brought into disrepute as long as he could linger a little longer in power.
