Sky debate: Sunak moves back into contention in Tory leadership race

This was no rehearsal for the coronation to come. Instead, last night’s leadership special on Sky News featuring Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak sprang a surprise. It was actually interesting and revealing and it showed that the contest to be Britain’s next prime minister could yet go to the wire. 

The occasion, it should be noted, was not a debate. The principals took part separately, as if afraid that in the heat of battle they might prove the old adage that a politician’s truest enemies are to be found not on the Opposition benches but in their own ranks. 

Sunak, looking like a brilliantined stick insect or the lead singer of a 1980s boy band, quickly won over the live audience, made up of Tory Party members, with an assured performance in which, while smiling throughout, he promised little other than blood, sweat and tears. 

“We in the Conservative Party,” he insisted, “need to get real and fast because the lights on the economy are flashing red and the root cause is inflation.” It wasn’t the tax burden that was causing the recession, it was inflation, caused in part by excessive borrowing. He would deliver tax cuts in the longer term, beginning with income tax. But in the short run – unlike some people he could mention – he wasn’t ready to put tens of billions of pounds on the country’s credit card. 

Those listening nodded in unison. If only, they seemed to be asking themselves, he had been in charge of the nation’s finances when the decisions were taken that left Britain so perilously poised. 

At one point, an elderly member of the audience complained that the cost of dentistry was now beyond the resources of millions of ordinary people. “What are you going to do about it?” he wanted to know. “I’m running out of teeth.”

The former chancellor – one of Britain’s richest men – laughed good-naturedly, showing in close-up on our TV screens an orthodontic lineup that Tom Cruise might have envied. Later, amending one of Martin Luther King’s best known aphorisms, he observed, to applause, that British people judge others by the content of their character rather than the size of their bank account. 

Earlier, in opening the proceedings, Liz Truss had eschewed the temptation to once more channel Margaret Thatcher. Instead of twin-set and pearls, she wore a modest red dress and stiletto heels, as, coincidentally, did the host, Sky’s Kay Burley, at her most ferocious, leaning back in her chair like Andrew Neil in drag. 

The foreign secretary made a decent show of competence but was undone by her attempt to be all things to all Tories. She would cut taxes; the green energy levy and the increase in national insurance contributions would go; she would tell the Russians where they got off; she would increase defence spending to 3 per cent; she would boost the number of grammar schools and academies. As for the regional payboards that she had boasted would save the Treasury £8.8bn by reducing the salaries of public sector workers outside London and the South East, she had listened to the resulting blizzard of criticism and accepted that it was not the right policy. 

Hmm. Adam Boulton, Burley’s erstwhile colleague, now a Reaction columnist, said once that there was a difference between saying, “that David Davis speech… I was falling asleep” and “that David Davis speech… I saw quite a lot of people in the audience falling asleep”. In that spirit, I can only say that as Truss defended her latest U-turn as proof of her essential virtue, I saw many in the studio audience shaking their heads. 

What did the pair agree on? They are, after all, members of the same party, obliged on 5 September to fall in line behind the winner. The answer is, precious little. Both would take a hard line on illegal immigrants (though how exactly they didn’t say); both undertook to invest usefully in the NHS and social services; both favour fracking and a stepping-up of the search for oil and gas in UK territorial waters. 

Curiously, there was no mention throughout the evening of the threatened trade war with the European Union or any reference to the Northern Ireland Protocol. Could it be that the Tory Party has finally decided to put Brexit to rest? It seems unlikely. The truce now in place has only a summer’s lease, and when it returns it will be with a vengeance. 

In the end, it scarcely matters which of the two Tory aspirants ends up as prime minister. What they get to do in the interval between being handed the keys to Downing Street and relinquishing them to Keir Starmer will be of interest primarily to currency speculators and the wags of Have I Got News for You – always assuming, in the latter case, that the show has not been cancelled by the BBC. 

Damage limitation is the most the victor can hope to achieve. Britain is not about to head off in a new direction under either Truss or Sunak. It’s too late for that. The coming two years will be a time of running repairs and crisis management against a backdrop of runaway inflation, fuel shortages and worsening international tensions. 

Is there anybody out there who honestly believes that the ragtag administration due to be cobbled together next month will be more than a holding operation? Does anyone think that Sunak, a Wykehamist and former hedge-fund manager married to the daughter of a billionaire, has what it takes to level-up society or that Truss holds the answers in her head to the complexities of modern Britain? The party’s only hope is that a worldwide economic recovery gets underway between now and the autumn of 2024 for which they get to take the credit. 

If the Conservatives genuinely wish to recover the nation’s trust, they must go into opposition. The only ones who don’t know this are those – a sad and diminishing coterie of no-hopers – who, in spite of all that has happened over the last six years, still account themselves the natural choice to lead Britain into a new age of plenty. 

The possibility exists, of course, that, against all the evidence, voters up and down the land retain every confidence in the Tory marque. In that case, why not prove it? The possibility of an early election was not raised last night – another bizarre omission – but if the party was somehow able to overcome the combined challenge of Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP, its new leader, however incredibly, would have earned the right to set the agenda for a new generation. Conversely, if the party, as most analysts suggest, went down to its biggest defeat since 1997, it would be time not just for a rethink, but a new beginning. 

For the record, the Sky audience, when asked who they would vote for in the leadership ballot, came down more than two-to-one in favour of Sunak. Even Kwasi Kwarteng, Truss’s campaign manager, admitted that his candidate had been outshone on the night. Will the foreign secretary recover from the setback and will it matter if she does? We will know soon enough.