Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are heading to Scotland today, as their gruelling nationwide tour of hustings reaches the halfway mark.
The event in Perth is the first of six remaining hustings, the last of which will be held in London on 31 August, and the deadline for ballots to be returned is 2 September. The result will be announced three days later.
In Scotland, two issues dominate: the union and the cost of living.
On the first, the two candidates are in broad agreement. Both say they are fiercely opposed to a second Scottish independence referendum, are highly critical of the SNP, and want more exposure for the Westminster government north of the border.
The second question is more fraught. Labour’s plan to freeze energy bills has gone down well – a rare Starmer success story. It intensifies pressure to pitch plausible solutions to the hammering of living standards.
Some Scottish Tories are yet to make up their minds on Sunak or Truss and will want to hear the details. It will also be a chance to tell if the candidates really mean what they say.
The contest is still Truss’s to lose. A recent Opinium survey of Tory party members puts Liz Truss 22 points ahead of Rishi Sunak. Though neither candidate will be much pleased to hear that simultaneous polls of members reveal that around two thirds of members would rather Boris Johnson remain in office than Truss (22 per cent) or Sunak (19 per cent) replace him.
In a blow to Sunak, former Wales Secretary Alun Cairns, has switched his endorsement from Sunak to Truss, saying he believed the Foreign Secretary is best placed to save the Union between England and the rest of the UK.
It follows Robert Buckland, the current Wales Secretary and former Justice Secretary, also changing allegiance at the weekend, writing in the Telegraph that Truss’s “plans give us our best shot at reaching our potential with the high-growth, high-productivity economy that we need not only to get us out of this crisis but to protect ourselves from the next.” Buckland is the first cabinet minister to make this switch.
Yet Sunak also bagged an influential endorsement this week. Paul Goodman, the editor of Conservative Home, who was previously sympathetic towards both candidates’ proposals for the economy – “In the medium term, she is right… but in the short term, Sunak is right” – revealed on Monday that he’d be voting for Sunak. He said he was guided in his decision by the judgement of MPs with whom the leader must work. In the final round of MP voting before the contest was opened up to the members, 38 per cent voted for Sunak, 6 per cent more than for Truss.
The key dividing line between the two candidates, namely the question of tax cuts, remains clear. In a recent BBC interview the education secretary James Cleverly, who supports Truss, said that: “under Rishi’s Chancellorship, we’ve slipped into a situation where we’ve got a higher tax burden than any point in the last 70 years… if we want companies to invest in this country we need to make ourselves more competitive”. At the most recent hustings in Cheltenham, Sunak said that Truss’s “corporation tax policy is simply wrong,” and that lower corporation tax in the past had not led to increased productivity.
Victory for Truss is still not a dead cert. Six more hustings provide ample opportunity for slip-ups and setbacks. Clearing the Scottish hurdle is her latest challenge.
