The outcome of the Foreign Secretary’s long summer campaign against former Finance Minister Rishi Sunak will be announced today, before Prime Minister Boris Johnson formally offers his resignation to Queen Elizabeth II tomorrow at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.
Voting by post and online by the approximately 200,000 Conservative Party members began in early August, a month after Johnson announced his resignation, and ended on Friday. Truss has overwhelming support for Sunak in militant polls. But the winner will have a brief political honeymoon when he enters number 10 Downing Street, after meeting the Queen in the Scottish Highlands, in a ceremony that breaks with tradition: the swearing-in of heads of government usually takes place at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. .
The UK is at the height of its worst cost of living crisis in generations, with double-digit inflation and rising energy prices due to the war in Ukraine. Millions say that with bills rising 80% from October — and even higher in January — they’ll be faced with a painful choice between food and heating this winter, surveys show.
Truss promised tax cuts, but they wouldn’t benefit the poorest. For weeks, conservatives on the front lines have ruled out direct aid and continued on Wednesday by swearing not to raise more taxes — a promise they soon broke.
In last Thursday’s edition of The Sun, Truss pledged to provide “immediate support to ensure people don’t run into excruciating energy bills this winter.” “I firmly believe that we must be radical in these difficult times,” he added, while previewing his Thatcherian reform agenda to cement the legacy of Brexit.
Tory MPs rallied against their Brexit hero after months of scandal, favoring Sunak over Truss as the leader best qualified to carry them through to the party’s next general election, scheduled for January 2025. joined Truss’s right-wing platform, though she was a former Liberal Democrat who opposed leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum.
“She’s a better politician,” John Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, told AFP after Truss stuck to a simple script during the campaign. “Sunak has shown some qualities that you would expect from a good minister. But Truss has shown the qualities that a politician needs,” Curticus added.
Whoever wins, recent polls of the general electorate show that conservatives face a growing challenge to retain the power they’ve held for 12 years. In addition to the cost of living crisis, the Labor Party benefited from the attack on Johnson’s ‘zombie government’. The main opposition party now has a double-digit lead over Conservatives in polls as the economic outlook becomes the bleakest since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979.
Source: DN
