The same almost certainly goes for chancellor Rishi Sunak – surely still the front-frontrunner. Sure, he’s associated in the public’s mind with spending squillions, despite doing his best to reassure his party that ‘COVID made me do it’. And that certainly beats swanning around the world doing trade deals most people haven’t heard of. It might also mean that he’s in a better position than his main rival to downplay his ideological drives. However, if Sunak runs for party leader, he won’t find it quite so easy to hide.
One potential advantage Sunak has over Truss, however, is that he comes from an ethnic minority and may therefore help the Tories address their long-term problem with the UK’s people of colour – although whether his appeal will go beyond the Indian diaspora, which is one of the few minority groups already increasingly inclined to vote Conservative, who knows?
Neither of the two frontrunners, though, looks set to do much – in both senses of that phrase – for younger (and, to some extent, better educated) voters, with whom the Tories have completely lost touch over the past decade or so.
Choosing to use National Insurance rises to pay for desperately needed funding for the NHS and social care, along with talk of adding to the burden of those with student loans, won’t help Sunak in this respect. And few millennials, paying through the nose in rent without too much hope of getting on the housing ladder until their parents pop their proverbials, are likely to appreciate Truss’s characterisation of them as “airbnb-ing, deliveroo-eating, uber-riding #freedomfighters!”
So, although the Tory party is famously, as historian John Ramsden once put it, “an autocracy tempered by assassination”, its current ‘world king’ may have some life left in him yet. And even if what is now no more than a trickle of letters to the chair of the 1922 Committee calling for a confidence vote in Boris Johnson eventually becomes a flood, Conservative MPs might want to pause a while and recall Hilaire Belloc’s warning to “always keep a-hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse”.
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