As all major polls predicted, the clear majority of the 172,437 members of the Conservative Party chose the UK’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss as their new party leader and, therefore, as the United Kingdom’s next prime minister.
However, the result is not quite as clear as predicted: 81,326 votes (57.4%) for Liz Truss and 60,399 votes (42.6) for Rishi Sunak. The enthusiasm for Liz Truss gets even smaller if one considers that 654 votes (0.4%) were spoilt ballots and that 30,058 (17.4%) Conservative members chose to abstain from voting in the Conservative Party leadership election.
In mid-August 2022, an Opinium opinion poll showed that many Conservative members had second thoughts regarding the sacking of Boris Johnson (who de facto resigned). 63% said they would prefer to keep Boris Johnson as PM, only 22% said they preferred Liz Truss. The comparison with Rishi Sunak was even better for Boris with 68% saying they preferred him over Sunak, who only had 19% of support as new PM.
Rishi Sunak was for many Conservatives a flawed candidate because he “stabbed” Boris Johnson in the back in early July when he (rightly) stood up against the incompetent, notorious liar in Number 10. Furthermore, in the Partygate scandal, his was issued a fixed penalty notice for breaching COVID-19 regulations. Last, but not least, Rishi Sunak’s wealthy wife Akshata Murty — through her father, she owns 0.9% of the Indian software company Infosys — enjoyed non-dom status. It seems to be legal but it is politically inconceivable that the British finance minister’s wife pays just £30,000 a year in taxes because she enjoys/enjoyed non-dom status.
On the other hand, during the Conservative Party leadership contest, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer did not promise lower taxes while increasing spending like Liz Truss, whose economic and financial program must be qualified as voodoo economics.
However, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are both Brexiters who backed the “oven-ready deal” which was, is and remains a fantasy. The tragedy for the United Kingdom is that the opposition leader, Keir Starmer, decided in early July to embrace the same fantasy with Labour’s 5-point “Make Brexit Work” plan. Only the LibDem’s have remained consistent when it comes to the European Union: they were for Remain and are now for Rejoin, the only reasonable long-term policy for the UK, the EU and the Free World. It will not happen over night, but steps in the right direction must be taken now.
A few details about the past of Liz Truss
In 2016, I wrote a small article about Liz Truss when she became the new British Secretary of Justice. Back then, she was a Remainer with good reasons. Under Boris Johnson, she became a Brexiter despite the fact that all the old arguments remain valid, notably: it never made any sense to leave the world’s largest free trade area aka the European Union to pursue free trade around the globe (my best article on the subject is in German from 2019).
At the beginning of her political life, Liz Truss was President of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats. She joined the Conservative Party in 1996. Liz Truss is married and has two children. In 2004/05, she had an affair with Mark Field, a married former shadow minister. Her marriage survived the affair and in 2009, when the affair came to the attention of a larger public, she survived a challenge to deselect her as Conservative candidate in Norfolk; David Cameron was among those who were in support of Liz Truss. A tempest in a teapot back then about the extramarital affair but, today, with Brexit fairytales, you can get away.
Luggage and suitcases at Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr and Amazon.co.uk. Beauty items at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
Photograph on top of this page: the official portrait of Elizabeth Truss. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, free to share.
Article added on September 5, 2022 at 14:38 Madeira island time.
