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UK Leadership Race Likely to Go Distance Even as Sunak Trails

Alex Wickham and Kitty Donaldson
·4 min read

(Bloomberg) -- With four weeks to go until the UK gets a new prime minister, front-runner Liz Truss holds such a sizable poll lead that her opponent, Rishi Sunak, could be forgiven for thinking the time has come to concede.

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Allies of Truss have been urging the former Chancellor of the Exchequer to do just that, to allow her to get to work on tackling crises facing Britain including a looming recession and a generational squeeze on living standards.

Yet leaving aside the difficulty in accurately polling the grassroots Conservative Party members who have the final say on Boris Johnson’s successor, there are several reasons why the race is likely to go the full distance. In fact, Sunak’s supporters insist there is no chance of him stepping aside.

Since the start of the contest, the Tory party has been determined to ensure the winner has faced appropriate scrutiny and not the kind of coronation enjoyed by Theresa May after Andrea Leadsom pulled out suddenly in 2016.

Some party grandees blame that for the internal wrangling that hampered May’s government over Brexit and contributed to her downfall, while it also angered party members who were effectively deprived of their chance to pick a leader.

To try to avoid it, Graham Brady, who leads the influential 1922 Committee of rank-and-file Tory MPs, gathered candidates in a room in July -- before Sunak and Truss made the final run-off -- and made clear he expected a full contest.

Candidates’ Pact

Though nothing was formally signed, it was made clear that a candidate who breached this understanding and withdrew would be seen as toast within the Conservative family, a person familiar with the matter said.

Now that ballot papers with both names have been sent out to members, it is impossible to formally withdraw, another person said. Still, that leaves Sunak options if he were so inclined, such as urging his backers to unite behind Truss. That’s something the foreign secretary’s team all but called for last week in a tweet.

That leads to the question of what Sunak would do next. Given the ferocity of his criticism of Truss, it is possible he would not be offered a senior job in her administration, even as she tries to get the parliamentary party behind her.

That could mean that at least for the foreseeable future, this contest is his last realistic prospect of a major job in British politics, providing him with further incentive to stay the course. Breaking the agreement to fight on would make it very difficult to stand again for Tory leader in the future.

Polling Challenge

Even as YouGov had Truss holding a 34-point lead in its latest survey, Sunak’s allies stress the contest is far from over. Even pollsters have acknowledged that polling the Tory party’s estimated 175,000 members is difficult, with many older and not as reachable with typical methods.

Prominent Sunak backer Oliver Dowden told GB News on Monday the race is closer than polls suggest. “We all remember before the 2015 election, that was written off for the Conservatives, before the Brexit referendum, that was written off for Brexit,” he said.

Though some members will have voted as soon as their ballots arrived in the post last week, others will wait to see how the contest progresses. And while Sunak’s campaign has faced difficulties, it has not been plain sailing for Truss.

She was forced into an embarrassing U-Turn on her suggestion that public sector workers outside of London and southeast England could face a pay cut.

Sunak’s pitch that he is the more likely of the two to win a general election was also bolstered by a YouGov poll on Monday suggesting the public wants the next prime minister to tackle inflation before delivering immediate tax cuts.

That fits Sunak’s argument, while his campaign has attacked Truss’s refusal to commit to further handouts to ease the cost-of-living crisis.

Ultimately, Sunak’s supporters say there are genuine policy differences with Truss and that the former chancellor has a responsibility to keep making his case. Calling Truss’s plan for immediate tax cuts a “fairytale” is not the type of rhetoric he would find it easy to back away from.

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