Is it too late for Sunak to win over Tory members?

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It took five ballots but she got there eventually: Liz Truss has secured the all-important second slot alongside Rishi Sunak. The two politicians are now gunning for support from Conservative party members. Sunak and Truss will take part in 20 hustings between now and 5 September, when the new prime minister will be announced. Eighteen will take place in front of Tory activists across the UK, while two will be televised: the first this coming Monday on BBC and the second on Sky on August 4.

(I tried to persuade one senior CCHQ official that they should produce a band tour T-shirt for journalists who have to cover all 18 events, but alas, they didn’t see the potential in an “I survived the 2022 Conservative leadership race” T-shirt. So much for the party of free enterprise.)

According to the polls and bookmakers, Liz Truss is the favourite to win. Some thoughts about that and the shape of the contest to come, below.

Truss the process

This is going to be a summer of bitter infighting for the Conservative party. Rishi Sunak starts this race knowing that if everyone voted tomorrow, he would lose. If he wants to win, he needs to tear down Liz Truss and change how Tory members feel about him.

As for Truss, she knows that because she is at odds with Sunak on tax and spending, it is highly unlikely that there will be a space for her in his government. The two candidates are in a fight, not only for the premiership, but for their continued political careers. It represents the biggest divide on economic policy within the Conservative party’s upper echelons since the late 1990s, when the party was split on whether to join the euro, and potentially since 1975, when Margaret Thatcher challenged Edward Heath for the party leadership.

But how much can we expect it to change? The argument that Sunak’s allies are making is that it is all to play for, the membership hasn’t made up its mind and that once the focus turns to the question of who can win an election, Truss’s lead will fade away.

Are they right? It’s worth remembering that the Conservative leadership election in 2019, and the Labour leadership elections in 2015, 2016 and 2020 were all pretty static. Boris Johnson started with a lead over Jeremy Hunt and he ended that way.

While I was working at the New Statesman during the 2015 Labour leadership election, I obtained private polling that showed Jeremy Corbyn was on course to win the contest. Results were taken after the first BBC hustings. Corbyn’s lead never faltered or faded from that point onwards.

Will it be the same for Truss now? Maybe! One argument in the foreign secretary’s favour is that Sunak is an incredibly high-profile politician. If Conservative members are not convinced of his qualities now, then surely they will not reverse their position after one month of hustings.

Added to Truss’s advantages is the reception from newspapers widely read by Conservative members. The Mail is very hostile to Sunak, and splashes today with Truss’s own words. The Times — which endorses Sunak today — had played it fair by both candidates. The Spectator magazine and the Telegraph are being pretty even-handed about the whole thing.

Truss’s lead among members has survived two televised debates already. But the BBC debate on Monday could be decisive: remember that many party members (of all parties) are not that engaged and the BBC debate may be a moment for Sunak to change the dynamic of the race.

But if after the BBC debate next week we see polling showing Truss is still ahead, it’s hard to see what event, other than some kind of scandal or crisis in the Truss camp, could change the dynamic of this contest.

It’s later than you think

The other thing to bear in mind is that most Conservative members will vote right away when their ballot papers arrive. (As indeed do most party members and voters: there is a pretty consistent pattern where people vote either the day their ballot arrives, or in a panic when the deadline approaches, across all political parties.) The ballots are due to be delivered between August 1 and 5.

Sunak really needs to have turned this contest around by the middle of August — otherwise he will almost certainly have left it too late.

Now try this

Georgina writes: While the release of Justin Kurzel’s film Nitram did not particularly excite Stephen, I found its retelling of the Port Arthur massacre both moving and disturbing, with extraordinary performances by Caleb Landry Jones and Judy Davis.

Nitram’s writer Shaun Grant started on the script in the aftermath of two US mass shootings — Thousand Oaks and Pittsburgh synagogue — in late 2018. He explained:

I wanted everyday responsible people to walk in the shoes of someone who should not have a weapon . . . and watch them walk into a gun shop and see how easy it was.

The film does exactly that. We never see the atrocities, never hear the murderer’s name. The horror is crystallised when we watch a human being, in cold daylight, hand over a stack of bills in exchange for an arsenal of weapons.

Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com.

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