Not enough cake. Dan Kitwood/Getty
Less than a year ago Rishi Sunak looked inevitable. His training for Number 10 involved standing next to Boris Johnson, spraying money at people, and waiting. The lucky contrast with his feckless boss allowed Sunak to acquire a not entirely merited reputation for competence. It began to be felt that Sunak was everything Johnson was not. “A good man”, said Matthew Paris. A “highly disciplined, rational individual”, drawled William Hague. He would have won this contest easily had it been held as recently as January.
Last night, at Wembley, Sunak was self-deprecating and valedictory. He said thank you nine times to 7,000 Tory activists. It was his final chance to say something meaningful. We had a rote stump speech, with a few extra notes of strangled emotion, from a campaigner who’d already lost.
Outside the arena, his supporters queued for warm white wine, clothed in various blues, and brave face grimaced when asked how Sunak lost to a panto-Thatcher act. “Rishi will fight to the end”, said Rohan Thandi, a perilously young Durham student. “The one candidate who will never give in.”
They believed he would linger on the backbenches after this maiming. But most backbenchers don’t have a deluxe Santa Monica escape hatch to drop through. After this disaster, will he still be milking constituents’ cows in North Yorkshire in ten years’ time?
For it was a disaster. Sunak’s undoubted work ethic, his ability to absorb data, and his uxoriousness have counted for nothing. Pitched as an antidote and a rebuke to the tribal giggling and fecklessness of the Johnson era, Sunak has been outmanoeuvred by the candidate in the field who most resembled Johnson. Restored sanity is less enjoyable than more cake.
Relaxed and winner confident on the arena stage, Truss cut more slices: she would never, ever introduce new taxes. By going full cake, Truss has forced Sunak to become the establishment candidate. Sunak was the teenage Brexiteer who gave off a Remain air; the creedal Thatcherite who sounded like Tony Blair; the unironic patriot who looked less loyal to old traditions than his opponent, who once wanted to put the monarchy on the chopping block. He was a conservative saint with a liberal halo.
Appropriately then, Wembley prefered Sunak to Truss — his welcome was louder, and longer than Truss’s was. The Conservative Party here in Wembley doesn’t look that much different from the people in the streets around the arena. Chuntering old colonels are thin on the ground. Despising net zero targets and believing a woman is a woman cuts across ethnicities.
But the support of London, like the endorsement of The Times, and the blessings of Michael Gove, were another sign that Sunak had the establishment on side. The party may be run and funded from London, but its spirit, and its insurgent energies gather outside the city. Sunak needed Stroud, Ludlow, and Stafford in the last six weeks, not London. He needed the Telegraph, not The Times.
Regional Tory members are small town car dealers, borough councillors, and third generation family butchers, but after Brexit, their politics are gloomy and radical. They feel disenfranchised by their party; they feel anxiously, down in their marrow, that something vague but critical is under siege. Like Roger Scruton, they feel the “old courtesies and decencies are disappearing”.
Their answer to end this season of insanity, poll after poll showed, is simple. Given the choice, they would landslide Boris Johnson back to the top of the Conservative Party. The next best thing is Truss. Her gags are not as good as Boris’ were, but she tells them what they want to hear: I will shrink the state. I will cut taxes.
Sunak’s response was a one man show where he split himself apart several times over. He promised to “tell the truth” — then told Tory members what he thought they wanted to hear. In Belfast: Sunak condemned benefits scroungers, after posing with a missile launcher slightly taller than he was. In Manchester: Sunak claimed fantastically to be “the most Northern chancellor in seventy years” to a room of Red Wall Tories. In Perth: Sunak laughed off the idea he would scrap the transport-them-to-Rwanda migration plan that (in saner times) he had “hoped to block”.
At Wembley, he resorted to the same clichés and worn-out formulas. “Maxing out the credit card” was wrong; only he could “safely steer us through the storms ahead”. Meanwhile Truss vigorously slagged off Sadiq Khan; the members screamed, and punched the air in gratitude. There was the difference in miniature. She knew what they wanted. Sunak was still the man who betrayed Boris, and raised national insurance.
This oddly static contest began in July but ended three months before in April. That was when Sunak Hindenburged. The revelation: his wife was a non-dom; he held a green card. He came across as shifty and disloyal. Nationally, his polling slipped 26 points, below Johnson’s for the first time. Among party members, the revelations about Sunak’s tax affairs did more damage to him than anything else. Truss began the contest with a polling lead of 24 points. Sunak’s team ordered miniature #ReadyForRishi bottles of suncream for journalists and made him do unsteady culture war pirouettes. By late August Truss’s advantage over Sunak had widened to 38 points.
Sunak is not a chest-beater. When he promised a “major crackdown” on grooming gangs yesterday, he was less at ease than when he talked about the Bank of England. Simply: he is not crass enough to convince as a culture warrior. St Crispin’s Day exhortations turn to ashes in his mouth. “What’s the point in stopping bulldozers in the green belt” Sunak yelled at one early campaign stop, “if we allow Left-wing agitators to take a bulldozer to our history, our traditions and our fundamental values.” Do we think Sunak had anything to do with lines like that? All Sunak’s attempts to play this low enforced the impression that he was an establishment candidate, incapable of imagination, performing the stock idea of what an insurgent candidate should be.
If Sunak was what his supporters said he was — a brilliant, efficient, presiding mind — shouldn’t he have done better than this? Early in August, he told county Tories about his Californian dreams. Solid burghers and Ludlow retirees listened to Sunak lavish praise on Silicon Valley. Were his idols Churchill and Disraeli, or the podcasting investment gurus and austerely hoodied tech founders of San Francisco? The impression intensified at one early hustings in Eastbourne, where Sunak said the word “California” three times in ten minutes. “He kept talking about California and tech”, moaned one campaign source. They said Eastbourne, on August 5th, was the moment Sunak’s own team realised he was on Pacific, not Greenwich Standard time. Telling Britain-is-best audiences to slavishly follow foreign patterns was an avoidable self-own.
You began to wonder whether his reputation had always been a mirage. On Sunak world they had stressed his brow-furrowed, adult man competence. He promised he would tell the truth. Michael Gove, introducing Sunak, said that his man always told the truth. “I’m prepared to tell people”, Sunak said in July, “that you can’t have your cake and eat it”. It came back to “being honest with people about the challenges we face”.
Unlike Truss, he had the power to face unpleasant facts. But unlike Truss he didn’t tell Wembley that he would never introduce new taxes. He was prepared to yarn on about political correctness, but he could never lie about the economic issues he really cared about.
After seven weeks of grinding, Sunak departs leaving one souvenir behind. His one flinty, Darwinian truth for the country. “Are we prepared to earn the success that we need in order to succeed in the world?”, he asked when the campaign began. Britain needed to compete, and its people needed “to be professional and ambitious and strive to be the best at what they do”. Could we be like him?
Though Sunak is young, last night he seemed old. He was an institution man in an era of discredited institutions; a millennial desperate to woo baby boomers; too conventionally serious for a politics now defined by tribal laughter. In the end, he failed his own Darwinian test. He did not have the depth, or like Truss, the ringing shamelessness, to adapt to the struggle.
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Subscribe“Sunak has been outmanoeuvred by the candidate in the field who most resembled Johnson. Restored sanity is less enjoyable than more cake.”
How insulting. How patronising. How very stupid. What an asinine comment.
Mr Lloyd, let me tell you what so many of us Conservatives actually do want, rather than have you tell us what we want. It certainly isn’t Johnson, or his absurd non-policies, and neither is it “More Blair/Cameron”, in the shape of Mr Sunak.
We want social conservatism, self-government, self-reliance and self-respect, secure borders, reliable public services, a secure energy supply, and decent infrastructure to support the homebuilding that the country needs.
We do not want platitudes, £100 billion train sets, virtue signalling, absurd, meaningless greenwash, a net zero policy that will bankrupt the country and its occupants, people being paid for doing nothing, or being preached at by a lazy, woke, and incompetent class of media and politicos who think they are smarter than us when, manifestly, they are not.
Some of you writers are no better than the politicians that you excoriate. You should try looking in the mirror more often, Mr. Lloyd. You may find that what appears to be your very considerable self-regard is misplaced.
I couldn’t have put it better myself!
I concur.
Brilliant!
(“Never use two words when one will do -Clement Attlee.)
Well said.
I’ll hope you will replace Liz when she hits the rocks! I agree wholeheartedly about social conservatism; it really is quite sensible… and bleedin’ obvious!
“He didn’t have enough depth — or shamelessness.”
Erm, the man has more front that Tesco’s!
He was the Chancellor, the second most powerful man in government, and last week he tried a shameless pivot on Covid measures, basically stating (in an interview with the Spectator) that he was very much opposed and tried to fight the measures but was overruled. He is seriously so arrogant he thinks he can override reality with marketing spin, and people will buy him in the role of “people’s champion”.
Perhaps he is the champion of the people at Davos, but certainly not the people of the UK. The man is a totally shameless, arrogant, elitist liar. I think you underestimate his capacity for grift and brazenness Sir!
Quite wrong Sir. He is Honest Truss is not.
I am impressed that you would think *any* politician is honest.
If nothing else, the last few years (and more) have shown us, more than ever, that almost without exception, they are not.
Truss is completely out of her depth. But I will still take her over a cunning snake like Sunak. At least she has folks like Frost advising her.
Both the options are dire though, I’ll give you that. This country is facing a crisis on almost every front. The over-bloated, corrupted carcass of state is decomposing in front of our eyes, and we are facing the worst cost of living crisis since WW2. And yet NONE of the people in leadership positions in the UK (or even prominent figures in the media) grasp this. In fact most are promising to double down, and rearrange the deckchairs a bit on this Titanic we used to call Britain. Rishi is a WEF puppet who offers the Davos agenda (which is what has caused most of the damage). Liz thinks LARPing as Margaret Thatcher and tinkering at the edges is going to cut it.
Boris fought to stay on (instead of handing over to Raab, as technically should have happened in the interim) …then proceeds to ponce off on what seems like an endless series of vacations. I was looking at the pictures of him in Greece thinking “you’re going to be unemployed in 2 weeks mate, couldn’t this wait until then?!”. The utter nonchalance of our leadership in considering the gravity of the challenges facing us is terrifying. And assuredly Labour would be even worse.
It’s alarming and upsetting.
For a moment, I thought you were talking about the U.S.? Sounds eerily similar, just change the names.
Not my first choice, none of the candidates were, until it was her or Sunak. Now it’s time to give her a break. That she’s out of her depth is received second hand nonsense. She’s survived that viper’s nest to get to this point. Mrs T didn’t grow a pair straight away either.
Fair point James, she has managed to survive the viper’s pit that is Whitehall this long, which counts for something.
I didn’t take my impression of her fitness for the job from tabloid reporting though, I’ve taken it from various interviews over a number of years. I appreciate what you’re saying about Thatcher not appearing fully formed as the Iron Lady, but Truss is no Thatcher, not in depth of principle, intellect or policy conception. I don’t see any of the same strength of conviction, or the sheer metal required to wage the multi-front war that the next PM needs to.
Nevertheless, I’ll take her over Rishi, and wish her the best (for all our sakes).
Interesting perspective, Mr Cameron. Please could you unpack it for us?
As the old Empire adage goes “if you see his lips moving you know that he is lying”.
This is a very extreme reaction. I can understand favouring Truss over Sunak, but not claiming that his speaking out against lockdown is cynical posturing (it was well-known at the time he was the most lockdown-skeptic of the ‘quad’), or that he is a “shameless, arrogant, elitist liar” or a snake. Criticise by all means but stay reasonable. This reads like you were the second-cleverest child in his class.
yes a WEF-y whiff about him
One issue for Sunak was that many Tory members run their own businesses, often as company directors paying themselves a mixture of salary and dividends. This constituency received nothing from the Treasury through Covid lockdowns, while people they despise (civil servants, academics etc) were rewarded with at worst 80% or in many cases full pay. No one has been able fully to account for this differential treatment, save for speculation that it was due to HMRC vindictiveness. But many of his audience will have been on the wrong end of it. Did he think they would forget?
Self employed directors pay themselves in a mixture of salaries and dividends for the sole purpose of lowering the amount of tax and national insurance payable. That is why HMRC and the government would not give the same support to self employed people during COVID and quite right they were too. Civil servants, academics etc don’t have that luxury of choosing between salaries and dividends.
That’s not true, and hasn’t been for years. The overall tax paid by a PAYE person on 100k and a sole trader/company director on 100k is pretty much the same because they raised the dividend tax rates.
So same tax, but the self-employed person has no security or benefits. It’s hardly a grift, it’s actually a lot easier to just go get an office job these days. I would know, I run a small business, but my partner is on PAYE. We earn almost the same, pay roughly the same in taxes, except he gets paid holidays and sick days where I don’t, and I hand the exchequer a further 20% of my revenues off the top as VAT.
People like me are paying for plenty. Without us the economy would take a massive hit. VAT revenues alone would be smacked into touch if even half of small businesses folded, which they well could in this recession/depression we are entering.
Very well said, though Philip Burrell’s position is understandable, and a common misconception. It was of course a Tory chancellor, Philip Hammond, who equalised dividend tax rates and imposed possibly the largest ever hike in tax rates – 7.5 percentage points – to achieve it, so Sunak was only reinforcing an impression created by his predecessor that the Tories are no longer the party of small business.
I would only add that we are not talking about director-owned businesses getting ‘the same’ support as those on PAYE – since less support might have been a reasonable position. We are talking about them receiving no support at all – which is why my plumber, for example, had to work right through lockdown 1 or face destitution, while being unable to see his own parents thanks to the restrictions that Mr Sunak has now decided were excessive.
Yes, very true on all points.
And like your plumber, I worked all throughout lockdowns/restrictions too, as did all the boys on my site (I manage construction). There was no possibility not to, as there was no support. If we don’t work then we don’t get to eat food and live in a house, simple as that. Nobody pays me to sit at home, I have to do the work to get the money.
Which I’m fine with actually, I don’t want anything from the government except to just get out of my way. I’m happy to work hard for what I have, and I don’t want hand outs. But I do take exception to them stomping on the economy, and then holding it under water for almost 2 years, and creating ruinous inflation that wrecks both my income pipeline and my savings due to their fatuous plans to power a 1st world nation on unicorn farts and moral pomposity. And then raising my taxes.
I just want them to leave me alone. Leave everything alone. They have the anti-Midas touch, everything they touch turns into a dumpster fire, and we pay for it. And while we are paying down and cleaning up the first disaster they run off and set a few more dumpsters on fire. JUST STOP TOUCHING THINGS, and GET OUT OF THE WAY so we can clean up the mess you ingrates! …sorry for the rant. :/
Best comment ever, JJ. Thanks.
Very well deserved and valuable rant, I must say!
Civil servants, academics etc have the luxury of living off the tax revenues the private sector ultimately generates.
Yes, fewer and fewer generating and ever more sucking us dry.
One, civil servants got no hand-outs during Covid; we worked our normal hours for our normal pay, and we paid our normal taxes – which you may be suprised to learn is the same rate a everyone else.
Two, do you understand the definition of ‘civil servant’ and how it differs from ‘public servant’? I’ll give you a clue … we [civil servants] are employed by and serve the Crown.
No, but they don’t risk their whole livelihoods investing time and money into running a business.
“Civil servants, academics etc” set about our freedom, society, the economy and business people’s livelihoods while organising full pay (or close to) for themselves. And you say “quite right they were too”. It is this sort of opinion which has lead to bankruptcy.
Actually, civil servants worked all through the pandemic and were not entitled to claim any furlough or other payment. HMRC worked long hours to roll out all the Covid schemes and in my own department we worked full time on our usual pay. Perhaps you misunderstand the distinction between ‘civil sevants’ who are employed by the Crown, and ‘public servants’, who are not and who work in the ‘public sector. Nice try though!
The issue is not whether civil servants worked or not during lockdowns. Sure they did, like many of the elite class who could easily work on their labtops from home. What the original poster was referring to is that civil servants, like academics, are effectively paid by the central government through taxes collected from the general population. i.e. the pay of civil servants is not dictated by results.
This is factually untrue. You are confusing receiving full pay with work. Civil servants, unlike company directors, received full pay whether they worked or not.
Rishi has lower member support outside of London mainly because he is seen as far more of a WEF candidate than Truss. I honestly think it’s as simple as that.
His economic messages do chime with Truss supporters, Will, whether you want to believe that or not. However the feeling is that WEF loyalty has been shown time and again to over-ride everything else in British politics. It runs deep in the establishment, and the country simply has no will to confront these truths. It’s been going on since Corbyn’s moment in the sun. Hammond should have been ripping their economic plans apart at the 2019 election but was mute.
Not sufficiently shameless? Do us a favour. If he’d taken on the supporters of protracted Lockdown and zero-Covid and yes, that includes your baying journalistic mob Will? Then resigned as he hinted he would if unsuccessful? He’d be winning this leadership contest by a country mile.
And if he does move to USA as is rumoured, then it will simply reinforce the feeling that he had no attachment to the country he campaigned to lead anyway.
It is true that we know whoever is PM that we will still have the establishment of Globalist Liberals beggaring the country while sneering at anyone who doesn’t agree with them and their BBC mouthpiece.
Yes..
They should have gone for Kemi.
Hopefully some day
There are 3 card carrying Conservative party members, that I know of (one a current Councillor, the other previous) living in my road, and all 3 of us wanted the chance to vote for Kemi.
A crying shame that we were denied the opportunity.
No one in public life – and, seemingly, as yet hardly any member of the public – is yet looking the facts in the face.
Cornwall Insight, which has had a practically clairvoyant record in predicting energy prices and got the latest new price cap accurate within £5, have declared that by next April UK homes will be paying £6,600 annually on average – and of course there is NO CEILING for price rises in non-residential properties.
This will be unaffordable by millions in residential dwellings; and absolutely unaffordable by all but a very few businesses – or institutions for that matter. (Think how many Gigawatts the NHS uses a week. How will it start to pay for them?)
Green energy is a wholesome goal; but if we wanted it, we had to begin serious research by government and science together working vigorously about 77 years ago, at the end of the Second World War. The objective should have been to acquire safe reliable (as wind is not) abundant affordable green energy which we could wholly make for ourselves.
Heaven knows, we had enough goads and motives so to do. In those days we were in a regular pickle over the problems of Persian oil.
But no: sin and sin’s handmaid folly as usual prevailed in human counsels. Short-termism, graft and cowardice were the regular cattle-prods; so this past quarter-century our wholly cowardly and incompetent Political Class, backed by the many crazies in the population, have shut down all possibility of our providing ourselves with home-made energy in the immediate and short term.
This country (and some other western democracies) is therefore due to be completely paralysed economically.
How on earth can shops, vast or tiny, or any producers cope with what will be a 500-600% increase in energy costs within the next 8 months? Such vast sums they cannot pass on to the customers.
There will probably be no shops &c.
In the 1990s I used to say, ‘Motoring has become again what it was in the 1890s: a rich man’s hobby’.
Shortly, in the United Kingdom, LIVING will be a rich man’s hobby.
But then, what else was ever to be expected? Since 1960 three generations have grown up which have resolutely insisted on believing in nonsense; e.g. about immigration ‘justified’ by the lunatic principles of multiculturalism and enforced ever more punitively by political correctness armed with police powers; about energy supply; about most issues – impervious to reasoned argument with mere facts and proofs. So now the flocks of vultures come home to roost = the consequences of their own wilful idiocy.
Shakespeare got it in one: as usual. ‘Oh sir, to wilful men/The injuries that they themselves procure/Must be their schoolmasters’.
Fully agree. The 1970’s (from early oil ‘shocks’ to the fall of Tehran) should have been a massive wake-up call to us regarding energy independence.
I’ve read and re-read your assertion that “Sunak is not a chest-beater. When he promised a “major crackdown” on grooming gangs yesterday, he was less at ease than when he talked about the Bank of England. Simply: he is not crass enough to convince as a culture warrior”, and cannot escape the thought that you actually believe that it is “crass” to actively want to stop young working class girls being systematically raped in British towns.
Please tell me that this is not what you actually think?
As for the rest of your column, it seems fairly straightforward to me. Sunak as chancellor acted very much like Gordon Brown. As a candidate, he has sounded very much like Gordon Brown. Either that or a WEF stooge.
For people like Will Lloyd, this evidently means that there is much to like.
For many Conservative voters, they believe Gordon Brown’s policies represented everything bad about the last 25 years, and that it is down to him as much as anyone that so many chickens are now coming home to roost. And therefore they’re voting en masse for the other candidate.
Well there is that…. and the fact that he has bankrupted the country.
Frankly, he’s a socialist who crashed the car while in the driving seat.
What did he expect the outcome of spending billions on paying people not to work would be … inflation, a recession, a labour shortage?
It’s been a while now but any political sea change takes time. Perhaps the Greek experience at the hands of the EU was an early example of the Establishment being rejected, although it was quickly whipped back into the fold. Then Italy has flirted with non-Establishment parties. Britain elected many anti-EU Parlimentary Members and then had the nerve to vote for Brexit (which the Establishment still resist). The United States voted for Trump who was not so beholden to the Establishment and the Establishment ‘got him back’. Macron’s grasp of the French Establishment is not as inevitable as it once was.
Under the ‘Sea Change’ hypothesis Sunak is perhaps perceived as the more pro-Establishment than Truss, and that puts Truss ahead in the eyes of many. We shall see how it all plays out.
His problem was he raised taxes. People want a prime minister that will represent them, not Whitehall.
Congratulations on one of the most bigoted comments I’ve seen outside of Twitter, Maureen.
The truly ignorant response of a pitiful, copper-bottomed bigot.
Do you hate all people older than yourself, Ms Finucane? Your parents maybe? Do you find that there other groups of people against whom you rail and discriminate? The English perhaps? Conservative voters, perhaps?
Were you born so intolerant, or did you have to take classes to perfect it?
Richi will love it in woke, slick-suited, surface-is-all,high-tax California. Good luck to him
…and supposedly the gubernatorial home of the next POTUS. Heaven forbid.
Of course, it’s very easy to talk about hard work and sacrifices when you’ve got the backstop of a multibillionaire wife who will largely shield you from the consequences of the policies that you’d likely follow as PM.
That said, Truss is a lightweight. She’ll turn the UK into a Banana Republic
Your first paragraph is correct. Your second is so way off the mark as to be laughable. Truss has risen to the top through hard graft, intellect, initiative and the ability to take on whoever seeks to disagree with her and win. That’s why she’s streets ahead in the contest, not just because of any perceived deficiencies in Sunak.
A banker in favour of QE, he has no idea how deep we are in the sh!t.
I fear that Truss’ popularity is based in her malleable nature. She is a seen as someone who could be bent to the whims of the members more easily than Sunak.
Is it wrong that a leader should try to make policy according to the wishes of the voters?
I think it’s good to listen to people and consider other points of view. It’s good to change your mind on things once you’ve had more information.
It’s terrible for a leader to go along with things that will be detrimental to the majority because a tiny, influential minority will benefit.
It creates instability, more disparity and more helplessness for the general population.
Told you so
Rishi Sunak is a lucky guy as is Boris. They can pack their bags and exit the political scene leaving Liz to flounder. This must rank as the best ever election to lose. The question now is how long before we have a Labour government?
Sunak’s transparently a nasty piece of work, the sort who give Tories a bad name.
It became clear quite some time ago that having a number of viable Tory leadership candidates from ethinc minority backgrounds would never be enough for the race baiting bigots of the left. “Thou hypocrite – first cast out the beam out of thine own eye …”. Funny how the left never have the minority candidates for the top job.
Your remark says everything about you and nothing about the Tory members. You should be ashamed. But I doubt you have the self-awareness to realise that.
Santa Monica and Silicon Valley and the man claims to be British?
‘At Wembley, he resorted to the same clichés and worn-out formulas. “Maxing out the credit card” was wrong; only he could “safely steer us through the storms ahead”.’
That showcases his twin talents: printing and borrowing money. A guy with this level of profligacy could only steer us into the rocks.
The English have a well-known dislike of swots. Sunak was the head boy at Winchester. The Chief Swot in a whole school of swots.
Boris may have been the Golden Boy at Eton, but he was never a swot. He was disorganized and eccentric, like a younger version of Patrick Moore, the astronomer. The English do love their eccentrics.
You’re not allowed yo SAY that! No matter if it’s true or not! And to be fair we do have not just a Sunak but also a Patel, a Khan, a Javid and many others at (or near) the top ..but maybe that it? Near is close enough? Up there at the pinnacle? …maybe a step too far? But then you fid have a Disraeli, after all..
This article is unreliable as it seems to know the future before it has happened. And I note the author has a newsletter called Hindsight! Two things are objectionable: the premise that the election result is known and that Sunak has lost. The election closes tomorrow and it is a secret ballot. How does the writer KNOW that Sunak has lost? Regardless it gives the excuse for vituperation and character assassination. David Hume, thou shouldst be alive at this hour!
Politicians are put in awkward positions by antagonistic media interviewers, their prepared questions aimed at backing a politician into a corner.
How good it would be to have a PM, like Rishi Sunak, who tells the truth about the economy and does not promise increased spending as well as handouts – beyond what is possible. He is supported in he canniness by The Institute of Fiscal Studies, a spokesman saying that the promises made by Liz Truss would bankrupt the country. Of course, her promises are political promises, only made to get elected..
However that is why I think she lacks integrity. We have surely had enough of that!
It is indisputable that Unherd’s lack of critical analysis and blatant support for Liz Truss during this long election campaign has been reprehensible. First of all you have an interview with Lord Frost backing Liz Truss and did not follow this up with a similar interview of a prominent person supporting Rishi Sunak. And then your editor allowed a cartoon at the top of one of your articles showing Liz Truss in Union Jack clothes and Rishi Sunak in yellow trunks with boxing gloves which is not only a slur but, I would maintain, is also racist. Now we have this snide article to counterbalance the support Rishi Sunak received last night.
Decisions will now have been made by Tory members and their votes posted but I am counting on the fact that polls are not always right when there is aggression or political views contrary to the stated norm, eg. The Scottish Independence Referendum where the polls gave the SNP a good majority and they lost 45% – 55%..
Interesting. In the U.S., the only politicians who are regularly put in an awkward position by an antagonistic media are those that don’t have a (D) after their name. They literally fawn over the dementia patient we have in office currently. No calls for a cognitive test here!
Let’s face it, nobody who tells British people the truth about themselves is going to last long in politics. We’re in denial and the younger the age group, the more the denial. Rishi is too good for us.
Perhaps he is too good for us in the same way as the present Canadian PM is too good for Canadians? They both have an autocratic tendency to whine that the voters are to blame for the failure of their policies. Not an encouraging tendency for a national leader in adversity.
I have an aversian to being ruled by unelected globalists whose ability to accrue great wealth appears to imbue them with the belief that it is their right and duty to tell humanity how to order itself. I also have a problem with the fact that Sunak is a member of the WEF, as apparently is Truss.
The difference between the two at present is that Truss appears to share some commonality with the electorate’s hopes for the future of our country and an energetic desire to help us back onto our feet, whilst Sunak appears always to be desperately striving to find some commonality with us whilst sending out a defeatist message. You will own nothing and be happy?
Sunak would have been admired and envied the world over as the most highly qualified, educated leader of any country, with the additional benefit of not needing his political job for the emolument, and being self made, as well as having a creative intellect and unrivalled financial qualification, but no…. we get standard issue Ms Leounge -Settee, whose main claim to fame is the manifest dishonesty of being an adulteress: how sad nu britn has become.
Seems about right
Oooh!… Blasphemy!!!… You and I will be banned from every single Intra M25 Heome Ceounties tea party forever for denying the new bourgeois sanctification Santa Adulterata te dium di Nonentiti….
He’s not more qualified than Macron, to give but one example. And the fate of Draghi in Italy shows that people are fed up with having technocrats imposed on them by the Davos set.
Voters are not stupid but they are also not calculating machines. They want to be able to believe that the future will be better than today. A leader must offer hope as well as pain. Jam tomorrow is fine, Rishi’s jam sometime in the next decade was just too uninspiring.
He most certainly is more qualified than Macron and Draghi, and we are not France or Italy