When it comes to the Conservative leadership race it is almost tempting to stock up on popcorn and watch the alley fight unfold.
The personal hatred between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss and their multiple failings will be plain to see over the next six weeks. The billions of coronavirus loan frauds perpetrated on the close-to-billionaire chancellor’s watch will come home to roost.
Hapless Liz Truss will not look so much like a global stateswoman as a knock-off market trader when the details of the hugely unbalanced Brexit deal she has done with Australia are heard. Both will try to knock each other out in a race to the tax-cutting bottom.
Sunak will make rash tax promises he knows are bad for the country, but good for the ears of Tory members who will choose the winner. Whoever emerges from this scrap ought to be a gift to Keir Starmer and Labour’s prospects of forming an alternative government.
Both are stained by association with the liar-in-general Boris Johnson and his two and half years of misrule.
Truss, who moved from the Lib Dems to the Tories and from Remain to Brexiteer queen in pursuit of her ambition, was in Johnson’s cabinet to the very end. Sunak, a rich kid married into a billionaire family, is only ever going to treat politics like a plaything.
If he loses he will be back to his Santa Monica villa as soon as decency allows. During these six weeks of Tory navel-gazing, the country at large will face very different priorities.
If it is not frying up in a climate crisis, it will be bracing itself for one of the hardest winters since the 1970s. For a ruling party that has no feel for what ordinary people are already suffering that hardly matters.
That’s why the public scrutiny of this pair of second-rate wannabes should not stop. The UK, constitutionally straining at the seams, battered by Brexit, facing the slowest Covid recovery and some of the highest inflation of the developed world, needs leadership.
It doesn’t need the craven ambition from the shallow end of the talent pool from which Sunak and Truss come. Never forget, they both got us into this mess, neither of them are able to get us out of it.
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