Shouty Sunak blew it while Truss came up with interesting ideas

Against all predictions, the Conservative leadership race has become more interesting. It has deviated significantly from the pattern it was supposed to follow. According to conventional wisdom, once the race had been narrowed down to Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the two contenders would proceed on tramlines, in a clearly defined trajectory.

Accepting that Sunak had a clear lead among MPs, once the parliamentary electorate had retired from the contest it was foreseen that he would be transformed from clear favourite to underdog as the second tranche of campaigning began, due to Liz Truss’s greater popularity among the party membership.

As the Sunak camp saw it, his task was progressively to regain the lead, by a process of attrition, peeling Liz Truss’s political reputation like an onion, layer by layer in successive debates, exposing her supposed lack of understanding of economic technicalities and the unrealistic nature of her fiscal promises. The only question was whether, in the relatively short time remaining, he would be able to detach enough Tory members from his opponent to come out on top. If, however, he could lure Truss into committing some gaffe, probably on economic policy, during one of their encounters, it might be possible to destroy her credibility and provoke a mass defection of voters to the former chancellor.

Not many commentators would have dissented from that plan; but what nobody foresaw was that the two supposedly complementary Sunak strategies, if badly executed, would collide disastrously. That is what happened during Monday’s BBC debate. Sunak’s coaches had clearly told him to come out fighting, assert his superiority from the start and put Truss on the ropes in round one. He did that, all right, and the consequences were disastrous.

Rishi Sunak’s chief asset was the gravitas associated with a recent holder of the post of chancellor of the exchequer. At a leadership election where, largely, it’s the economy, stupid, his most recent portfolio was expected to stand him in good stead. It was all a bluff, of course: Liz Truss was his predecessor as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was involved in complex economics as International Trade Secretary, and held ministerial appointments before Sunak entered Parliament in 2015. Nevertheless, Rishi hoped to pose as the economic “expert”, exploding Liz’s fiscal proposals.

In his anxiety to score, he shouted her down on a scale unprecedented in a British television studio. The reputational damage to Sunak was enormous; his image as the “nice”, polite politician was blown out of the water. Even if he adopts the courtesy of Jacob Rees-Mogg for the remainder of the contest, that first impression will not easily be erased from Conservative members’ minds. They do not need an ugly, feminist neologism such as “mansplaining” to characterise the situation: one speaker was shouting down the other, which would have been equally unacceptable between two men.

The audience that mattered was the one most alienated by such behaviour, a predominantly middle-aged to elderly constituency that values good manners, especially exercised by men towards women. Near the end of the barrage, even as she pleaded to get a word in edgeways, Liz Truss betrayed the hint of a smile, as she must surely have been thinking: “I can’t believe he’s gifting me this.”

Yet even that reputational loss was only part of the damage Sunak inflicted on himself. As any experienced debater could have warned him, by monopolising speech he was debating against himself. If he was really bowling economic googlies to Truss, why did he not maintain silence, to allow her to struggle to respond, possibly to falter, instead of letting her off the hook by seizing back the talking bone himself?

The overall outcome of Rishi Sunak’s raucous conduct was to remind the audience that, simply because he held the chancellorship for more than two years that does not make him an elder statesman or economic guru, and that he is junior in experience to Liz Truss. The reasons she entered the post-parliamentary stage of the election with an appearance of trepidation were that she trailed Sunak badly in the parliamentary vote and she is not a polished debater.

Now, however, that lack of polish is beginning to tell in her favour: to voters it sounds like plain speaking, contrasted with her opponent’s well-rehearsed Treasury-speak. It appeared that Truss was maintaining her position, possibly with growing confidence, in the TalkTV/Sun debate, until it was abandoned when the moderator fainted.

However, interesting though these largely presentational developments are, more important still is the unexpected emergence of some new thinking in the Tory debate and that is due to Liz Truss. She has pledged £30bn in tax cuts, starting “from day one”. Granted, part of that pot would come simply from not implementing planned tax hikes, such as the 6 per cent rise in corporation tax, but she would also reverse the already existing increase in National Insurance and suspend green levies on energy bills for two years, which would be genuine tax cuts.

The Covid pandemic imposed a crushing debt on Britain, but Liz Truss proposes rolling the £311bn Covid bill into a special category, on the model of Second World War debt, refinancing it so that it would be paid back over a much longer period. To say that this offends Treasury orthodoxy would be putting it mildly. Rishi Sunak, who accurately reflects the Treasury mindset, has denounced Truss’s willingness to borrow more to fund tax cuts, saying it is “our children and grandchildren” who “will pick up the tab for that”.

What Sunak may not realise is that many hard-pressed people struggling to pay energy bills and put food on the table might think it preferable their grandchildren should foot part of the bill. In the Tory leadership election, it is the present generation that will be voting, not their grandchildren.

On defence, Truss outbids Sunak. Britain’s defences have been badly damaged over recent decades by the Treasury’s treatment of our sovereign security as a Cinderella category. It is a measure of how far Rishi Sunak is in thrall to Treasury-think that he has refused to commit to the “arbitrary” rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP promised by Boris Johnson. Liz Truss would go up to 3 per cent, “by the end of this decade”.

On immigration, both Sunak and Truss would continue the Rwanda scheme, whose one result so far has been to divert some of our immigrants in the direction of Dublin, flushing out some of the hypocrisy that has surrounded the immigration topic on “the island of Ireland”. Liz Truss has also said she wants to see reform in the way ECHR rulings are applied in Britain, but “would be prepared” to withdraw from it. That is a step in the right direction, but since withdrawal is the only solution, why will she not grasp the nettle and pledge to withdraw from the ECHR?

Similarly, on net zero, the Truss line is that “we need to reach net zero in a way that doesn’t harm businesses or consumers”. There is no such way. Net zero is an absolutist project to turn the Sun down to mark 4, with every country on the planet driven to the same target. Britain contributes only one per cent of the greenhouse effect, yet is charging ahead of China (28 per cent) in self-flagellating greenery.

The recent hysteria over a 40° temperature, in one place for an hour, obscures the questions: if temperatures rise, for how many days in the year will they be problematic in Britain, what remedies can be put in place, and why should we recalibrate our entire energy system in response to a couple of weeks of discomfort?

On housing, Truss’s priority of urban building on brownfield sites will reassure her constituents and the wider party membership, while Sunak has similar views, though he wants to scale back government funding for affordable housing, with incentives for developers to build homes poorer people can afford.

On the trans aggression, both candidates are making the right noises. But the woke problem goes further than that. The civil service needs to be gutted of woke obstructors of Conservative policies. A leaked document revealing that Liz Truss urged Dominic Cummings (for those who remember, that was the rough sleeper who used to slink into Number 10 in the wake of Larry) to scrap hundreds of woke civil service posts, deploring “risk averse” Whitehall’s “liberal groupthink”.

It is time, once and for all, to tackle the deep state. In 2020 the Government banned “unconscious bias training” in Whitehall; today it remains mandatory for civil servants. Now Jacob Rees-Mogg is pledging to end “well-being and diversity training” for officials. Why are successive declarations of reform followed by no change? Liz Truss has moved to prise Stonewall out of its wholly illegitimate intrusion into government – an organisation that has recently pressed for pre-school provision for “transgender” two year-olds.

So far in the leadership race, things are not going well for Rishi Sunak. The latest YouGov poll gives Liz Truss an 11-point lead, based on performance in the BBC debate. That is an assessment of the debate, independently of her wider lead as candidate among party members. But the debates were supposed to help Sunak, not confirm his underdog position. In the abandoned TalkTV/Sun debate, Sun readers gave Truss best by 58-42.

The reason is obvious. Rishi Sunak is cautious to the point of inertia: he represents stasis, which is the one situation Britain cannot afford. To struggling Britons, he is the multimillionaire whose taxes are strangling them. Liz Truss is not very impressive; we have no guarantee she would walk the walk; but she is offering some striking new ideas, e.g. the Covid fund, while Rishi Sunak cannot now credibly change his inert stance. It looks as if Britain is about to experience its third woman prime minister.