The morning after the final vote of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, the newspapers were full of it. 

That morning, Liz Truss gave the BBC her first broadcast interview since her selection, and she was full of it too. She told the Today programme that successive Labour and Tory governments had stifled economic growth, but that she would drive through change. It wasn’t clear whether she meant she’d drive change through the nation, or simply drive through change, as she might drive through a busy town centre, trying to avoid the worst of the traffic and ignoring the odd red light. It was also unclear, whatever she might be planning to do, how she was going to do it.

That manner of blather may nevertheless play well with the constituency which will decide whether she or Rishi Sunak becomes the next leader: the grassroots membership of the British Conservative Party. After all, they adored the bumbling, blustering, bombastic Boris Johnson. This unrepresentative electorate comprises members who are, on average, relatively old (with forty per cent over 65), tend to live in the south-east of England and to have voted to leave the EU, and are predominantly white, middle-class, and male. There are between 160,000 and 200,000 of them, although their party won’t provide exact numbers. They are reputed to harbour rather less progressive perspectives on modern multicultural Britain than many of their own MPs.

They are therefore generally thought to be more likely to vote for a loud-mouthed hardliner than for a person of intellect, nuance, and ethnic minority heritage. Thus, that morning, the Daily Telegraph declared it was ‘advantage Truss’. The Financial Times called Liz Truss the ‘slim favourite’ to win. The front page of the Daily Mail featured Ms. Truss promising tax cuts. 

The Times, however, had leant in favour of the former Chancellor: its front page opened with the news that ‘Liz Truss cannot win the next general election’ – at least according to Mr. Sunak. It predicted a ‘bruising contest ahead’, while The Guardian announced the start of a ‘blue-on-blue dogfight’.

Within a few days of their selection, a poll of party members placed Ms. Truss an apparently unassailable twenty-four points ahead of Mr. Sunak. However, rumours were rife that supporters of the vanquished candidate Penny Mordaunt – who had been battered by a media smear campaign orchestrated by Team Truss – were already busy working to persuade local Conservative associations to throw their weight behind Rishi Sunak. One was quoted in the press as saying that, under Truss, the party’s future electoral hopes would be ‘totally f***ed’. I don’t think he meant they’d be fulfilled.

Having lost their favoured candidates (who had included Ms. Mordaunt) through the Machiavellian machinations of the parliamentary selection process, the Conservative Party is now faced with a difficult and often unwelcome choice. It is not simply a matter of a toss-up between the pair, and it’s not just all about their contrasting tax plans. The two candidates look starkly different, in terms of their personal qualities, their philosophies, their styles and their backgrounds. 

Rishi Sunak’s mother was born in Tanzania, his father in Kenya. Of Indian heritage, his parents moved to Britain in the 1960s. Sunak was born on the south coast of England in 1980, and attended the elite private boys’ boarding school, Winchester College, an establishment whose alumni have included an obscure eighteenth century Tory Prime Minister, the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, several archbishops, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, Margaret Thatcher’s deputy Willie Whitelaw and her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, a BBC Director-General, the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s far-left senior advisor Seumas Milne.

Sunak went on to study Philosophy, Politics & Economics at Oxford and later won a Fulbright Scholarship to take an MBA at Stanford. He managed a hedge fund and married the daughter of a billionaire businessman. He became a Tory MP in 2015, and, as second-in-command at the Treasury, assumed the role of Chancellor when his boss quit in 2020, in protest at the way Boris Johnson ran his administration. Mr. Sunak resigned for similar reasons last month. 

During the height of the pandemic, Sunak oversaw the successful job retention scheme, and helped to keep the hospitality industry in business by subsidizing meals out. He is now promising to mend the country’s broken healthcare system. Last week, a parliamentary report declared that the UK’s National Health Service is facing the worst staffing crisis in its history, which has made the timeliness of Mr. Sunak’s pledge urgently clear.

While committing to prioritize such investments, Rishi Sunak nonetheless remains a fiscal conservative who seems determined to start to pay off the massive government debt that accrued during the Covid-19 crisis. That does not necessarily play well with self-serving party members eager to have their own tax burdens reduced.

Mr. Sunak faces a few other image problems in the true-blue shires. The first is that his own high-profile resignation precipitated the flood of departures which forced Boris Johnson from office. Johnson loyalists resent him for that; but those hostile to Mr. Johnson won’t thank him for his years of apparently duplicitous support for the outgoing Prime Minister. Boris Johnson’s die-hard backers have also raised eyebrows at the speed with which Mr. Sunak was able to release his leadership campaign launch video, almost as if he had been preparing for the moment some while in advance.

Sunak is also tainted by the ‘Partygate’ scandal. He and Mr. Johnson are the only two politicians known to have received police fines for participating in the unlawful social gatherings in Downing Street which breached the government’s own lockdown rules. Yet at least he never lied about it. (But that might just have been because he hadn’t been asked about it.)

His greatest single liability is his wealth, along with his wife’s wealth. Outrage erupted in April when it emerged that Mrs. Sunak had used her non-domiciled status to avoid paying British taxes. As a result of this controversy, she is now reported to be paying the UK Treasury about £20 million per year, on a wholly voluntary basis. Disquiet was also provoked when, at the same time, it was reported that Mr. Sunak himself holds the right to permanent residency in the United States.

He is a quiet, calm, calculating, and clever man, a soft-spoken, smooth communicator and a person of cerebral subtlety, strategy and substance. The same cannot be said of his opponent, Liz Truss. While Sunak might appeal to the brains of the Conservative Party, his rival’s hold upon their affections is much more visceral. She’s a Tory by instinct, by gut, by spleen and by bile. She is a Tory blue in tooth and claw.

Related News

News from Nowhere: 'Seeing Red'

News from Nowhere: And the loser Is…

Yet it wasn’t always so. Born in 1975, Mary Elizabeth Truss was raised by left-wing parents to oppose the threat of nuclear proliferation and the anachronism of the British royal family. She was educated in Paisley (in Scotland) and then Leeds (in Yorkshire), a far cry from the pampered privileges of Sunak’s soft southern schooling. 

Like her opponent, she studied Philosophy, Politics & Economics at Oxford – but then so did former Tory premier David Cameron and former Labour leader Ed Miliband, along with his former Foreign Secretary brother and that former Labour Director of Strategy and Communications, the increasingly ubiquitous Seumas Milne. (Boris Johnson also went to Oxford, where he studied Classics. His predecessor Theresa May read Geography. Tony Blair read Law. Margaret Thatcher, also at Oxford, was a chemist.)

As a student, Liz Truss had been an active and vocal Liberal Democrat. On leaving university, she worked as a management accountant for a multinational fossil fuel conglomerate. She joined parliament in 2010 and was an ardent advocate of Britain remaining in the European Union, until 2016 when the country voted to leave, and she suffered a radical change of heart. Some see her as a healthy pragmatist, others as a cynical and unprincipled opportunist. 

She became Foreign Secretary last year and continues to serve in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet in that capacity. The blond buffoon’s supporters like her for that. 

She is also the darling of her party’s hardline right, partly because of her pledges to reduce taxation and her vociferous advocacy of the advantages of Brexit, but also because of an infamous speech she gave in 2014, in which she lauded plans to open up new pork markets in China and angrily branded the British fondness for imported cheeses ’a disgrace’. (The former point has, however, somewhat rebounded on her, with both candidates now accusing each other of being too close to Beijing.)

More recently, she urged UK citizens to go fight in Ukraine, and later denied ever having said such a thing. That was, of course, typical party-pleasing fare in the ignoble tradition of the departing premier’s penchant for bluster and flummery.

A vaguely xenophobic, socially conservative, free-market Brexiteer without a massive capacity for intellectual reflection, she may be precisely what many in her party think they want. She resembles Boris Johnson without even the slightest vestiges of an environmental conscience – Johnson without the jokes.

She models herself – and even her dress sense and her suddenly deepened vocal tones – on Margaret Thatcher, but she fails to understand that Margaret Thatcher would never have been so insipid or uninspired as to have modelled herself on anyone else. She seems like something of a discount-store Iron Lady. Where Thatcher spoke with a passionate authority, Truss sounds like the overly enthusiastic captain of a school hockey team, an inexperienced supply teacher at once incongruously patronising and profoundly out of her depth. For all her zeal, her prattling policy pledges and protestations of political commitment ring about as true as an old imperial halfpenny piece rattling away in a rusty tin can.

It should be stressed, though, that Truss isn’t the only one to invoke the spirit of the Tories’ late great Plutonium Blonde. Early in his campaign, Sunak visited the iconic Baroness’s birthplace to lay claim to the values of what he called ‘common-sense Thatcherism’.

The other thing the pair share in their bids to attract votes from the Tory heartlands is an emphasis on tough action to reduce immigration, with both promising to press ahead with the current government’s controversial plans to deport refugees to the central African nation of Rwanda. It might not be ethical, lawful, effective or even workable, but it’s precisely the kind of thing that they believe should appeal to the Little Englanders of the Home Counties.

A week ago, the pair faced off in their first TV debate. It was not a particularly edifying experience, in intellectual, emotional or moral terms. As one BBC correspondent put it, they ‘tore into each other’ in a ‘fierce clash’ over tax policies, with Truss suggesting that Sunak’s strategies would push the economy into recession and Sunak declaring that the ‘short-term sugar rush’ of Truss’s proposed tax cuts would eventually ‘tip millions of people into misery’.

Neither came out of it a clear winner. The same was the case in their second debate, last Tuesday. That debate was however extraordinarily curtailed when the host collapsed live on air shortly after having asked Liz Truss a question about Ukraine. While Ms. Truss’s response could hardly be considered enthralling, it came as something of a shock to everyone involved (including Truss herself) that her response would be sufficient to make the presenter lose consciousness.

This seemed an apt enough metaphor for this leadership race. The entire process has become increasingly unpleasant, farcical and bizarre. Nobody really seems to be winning here. The most obvious losers so far in this contest have been the reputations of the British Conservative Party and of British democracy. And whoever eventually wins will, of course, have the most godawful political and economic mess on their hands.

So, there we have it. Dishy Rishi versus Dim Lizzie. Some would say it’s not much of a choice. Neither topped the polls of party members conducted during the course of the parliamentary ballots. Ordinary Tories favoured figures who hadn’t served in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet. But their MPs didn’t give them those options.

In this way, the future political leadership and socioeconomic direction of the UK has found itself caught between an immoveable fiscal rock and a right-wing hard case, between a charming devil and a ‘true blue’ conservative boasting a conspicuously capitalized ‘C’.

But, just so long as she doesn’t say or do anything insanely stupid, Liz Truss currently looks set to win. The race is therefore still pretty much open. Anything could happen in the next month or so, and it very probably will.