LONDON — In the final hours before Tory lawmakers chose the two candidates who will face off to become next British prime minister, anxious supporters of Foreign Secretary Liz Truss were engaged in a desperate operation to scare up votes.
Truss, 47, had trailed in third position through successive ballots when her hard-line Brexiteer allies starting warning MPs of the potential consequences of her elimination. According to people with knowledge of her tactics, Truss’s outriders told wavering MPs that her defeat would open the door for former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage to make a comeback that could cost them their seats.
Truss added 27 votes to her tally from the previous ballot to edge out Penny Mordaunt by just eight votes and join former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak in the run-off vote of party members. But despite only squeaking through the ballot of MPs, Truss is now the clear favorite to be the U.K.’s next prime minister, with a YouGov poll suggesting 62% of members want her to win, compared with 38% backing Sunak.
The two candidates this weekend are embarking on a six-week campaign before the result of the members’ ballot is announced in early September. Whoever comes out on top faces a hazardous path to the next election, scheduled in about two years time, with the country in the grip of a brutal cost-of-living crisis and a growing list of complaints against the governing Tories after 12 years in power.
Up to six Tory MPs are set to vacate their seats in the next year for reasons ranging from scandal to early retirement, a senior Tory said, each one triggering a difficult by-election that will offer Labour a chance to show the tide is turning toward a Keir Starmer government.
In a sign of the mixed up state of Conservative party politics, Truss is positioning herself as the natural successor to protect Boris Johnson’s legacy on Brexit and as the change candidate.
Sunak is a continuity candidate of sorts, promising to carry on the gradual effort to clean up the public finances he pursued alongside Johnson. But he’s also battling to refute allegations that he betrayed the former prime minister and helped to engineer his downfall.
Truss is promising to tear up the economic status quo with immediate tax cuts funded by borrowing, while Sunak says he won’t lower taxes until inflation is under control.
When the Times and The Financial Times ran articles this week appearing to favor Sunak, one Truss supporter sent them round on WhatsApp in celebration, believing that the headlines would encourage party members to back their candidate.
Truss’s team is less interested in the backing of the old British establishment represented by the Times and the FT than The Daily Mail, the newspaper of choice for thousands of Conservatives in the smaller cities and towns across England who will determine the contest.
The Mail has run a series of unflattering stories about Sunak, who is struggling to shake off the idea that he encouraged the wave of resignations that forced Johnson to announce his departure earlier this month. Sunak’s team deny that his decision to quit Johnson’s Cabinet was part of any kind of conspiracy.
All the same, the entrenched nature of that narrative hit home for one Sunak ally when they picked up a copy of the latest Spectator magazine, a right-wing weekly, to see Sunak depicted in a cartoon brandishing a knife.
While Truss is starting the campaign with the advantage, both teams insist the result is not a foregone conclusion.
One Sunak supporter pointed to the volatility in recent polls to argue that many members might still change their minds. They said that while Truss might have been able to make strong early running with populist announcements on tax, the consequences of her economic policies and her own performance as a potential leader would come under intense scrutiny during TV debates over the crucial next two weeks before ballot papers go out.
Team Truss though is bullish after the last-minute push that secured her place in the run-off.
They argue that it wasn’t just the Farage scare tactics that delivered for them.
They also managed to win the unexpected backing of about 10 MPs who’d previously supported another moderate candidate, Tom Tugendhat, helped by Mordaunt’s long-running feud with Tugendhat’s campaign chief Anne-Marie Trevelyan.
It also helped that Mordaunt’s campaign imploded — one MP who supported her described it as the worst they had ever seen and an aide said the campaign had had to delete 15 tweets posted from the candidate’s account in the last two weeks, in a sign of their amateurism. Most famously, one suggested that MPs would “murder” the Tory party if they put Sunak and Truss through to the final ballot.
That offers a glimpse of the toxic mood in the divided parliamentary party that will be a key part of Johnson’s legacy.
If it’s Truss, the majority of her MPs will have opposed her candidacy, either because they were swayed by Sunak’s argument that her economic policy is a “fairytale,” or Mordaunt’s view that she is a dirty and dishonest campaigner.
For Sunak, the parliamentary ballot suggests that about a third of MPs — those who backed Truss — either want revenge on him for the fall of Johnson, or they believe he is an establishment figure who doesn’t represent the right.
Neither candidate will have an easy job creating a united front. But the economic challenge is arguably even tougher.
Sunak has been most forthright about the specter of inflation and the scale of the problems ahead, which mean there is little time to turn the situation around before the next election.
As one party strategist put it, the next prime minister will ultimately have to explain why 14 years of Conservative government have ended with a low-wage, low-growth, high-tax economy and public services in decline.
The only consolation for the winner is they will have a working majority of 71 to lose.
