Rishi Sunak will launch his fight in the Tory leadership race from Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace this weekend, with his supporters urging party members to delay voting until they have seen him take on Liz Truss in more debates.
Sunak’s campaign team is drawing up plans to try to reverse what it called a “worrying trend” after Truss led by 24 percentage points in party member polls. Some 160,000 members will have the chance to decide the next prime minister when they receive their ballots from August 1-5. They can vote immediately or wait until the September 1st deadline.
In a speech in Grantham, Thatcher’s hometown in Lincolnshire on Saturday, Sunak will try to advance the debate on tax cuts.
A flurry of media appearances and visits is expected over the next fortnight, along with a dozen face-offs where the candidates will face off over the course of the six-week campaign.
Sources supporting Sunak said that while party members could vote from August 1, they would be asked not to rule him out until later in the contest.
“We all think she [Truss] he will be so bad at the hustings that the members will change their minds,” said one. Another predicted: “He will shine in the hustings, while Truss is mental and will be found out.”
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Sunak will also stress more strongly that the Tories could lose the next election under Truss, and that he is best placed to take on Labour.
To prove the point, his team is said to be planning trips to “blue wall” constituencies where large Tory majorities were overturned in by-elections, such as North Shropshire and Tiverton and Honiton in Devon.
Wary of being outdone by Truss on personal tax cuts, Sunak’s supporters are pushing for him to attack the plans directly, arguing that taxpayers’ money would be better spent on new and refurbished hospitals than on the debt repayments required under the plans. ‘indebtedness of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
One ally summed up the argument this way: “If you’re stuck with the economy, there’s no way you can do all the other things you want to do because you’re constantly fighting fires.”
Robert Hayward, a Tory father and election expert, said that despite the YouGov poll putting Truss 62% to Sunak’s 38% among party members, excluding undecideds, he was “not convinced” that the result was a foregone conclusion.
“It is absolutely clear to me that the fluidity of opinion shown by members and voters in recent weeks indicates that this could all change in the wake of the debates and other political events,” he said.
But Chris Hopkins, associate director of Savanta ComRes, said Sunak’s popularity among party members was “terrible”. He added: “I don’t think Sunak’s resignation and perceived disloyalty to Boris [Johnson] has a lot to do with it, it seems as if the members are punishing him for the decisions he made as chancellor.”
Sunak has also set his sights on securing the support of more than half of Tory MPs. However, some of the more than 100 who backed Penny Mordaunt are reluctant to back Sunak.
One said: “I’d rather Rishi than Liz, but they were both reporting against Penny, they both used the trans issue as a weapon or stood back and let it go. I don’t trust either of them.”
Encouraging Conservative members to hold off voting until later in the contest may also be counterproductive. “Our members are stubborn bastards,” admitted one Sunak supporter. “I can’t imagine we’ll have a lot of changes.”
Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator magazine, also predicted: “Some Tory members may wait diligently until they have seen all 12 fairs. But most will finish the vote quickly and then go on holiday.”
From the 1st to the 5th of August, ballots for the Conservative leadership race will begin to fall into members’ mailboxes. The packets will contain a code to vote online or they can return a paper form.