Sunak has little over a week to damage Truss in potentially brutal battle for Tory leadership

The Conservative leadership contest may have been triggered by questions about Boris Johnson’s character but it is set to be a battle over policy rather than the personality of the candidates. The struggle between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss has made manifest the contradiction at the heart of Johnson’s government as he sought to hold together the electoral coalition that delivered his 80-seat majority in 2019.

Faced with a choice between satisfying former Labour voters on relatively low incomes who need well-funded public services and traditional Conservatives who want tax cuts, Johnson’s instinct was to please everyone. During the coronavirus pandemic, Sunak agreed as chancellor of the exchequer to borrow hundreds of billions of pounds to fund the extraordinary government interventions needed.

But when the pandemic ended, he insisted that Johnson’s spending plans — including a government guarantee that nobody should have to sell their home to pay for social care — must be funded by higher taxes. The tax rises were unpopular and Truss has promised to reverse at least £30 billion worth of them on her first day as prime minister but Sunak argues that they must remain in place until inflation is brought under control.

“You have to earn what you spend,” he told the Daily Telegraph.

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“We will cut taxes and we will do it responsibly. That’s my economic approach. I would describe it as common-sense Thatcherism. I believe that’s what she would have done.”

Sunak has accused Truss of peddling fairy tale economics

If Sunak is presenting himself as a Thatcherite committed to fiscal discipline and sound money, Truss has called for Reaganite, deficit-funded tax cuts, arguing that they will generate economic growth. She wants the debt racked up during the pandemic to be treated as wartime debt and repaid over decades, a policy that could see more than £300 billion in debt refinancing.

Sunak has accused Truss of peddling fairy tale economics and a huge increase reported on Thursday in the cost of servicing Britain’s government debt will reinforce doubts about the wisdom of her plan. But with a new poll of Conservative party members showing Truss extending her lead over Sunak to 24 points, the former chancellor does not have much time to turn the race around.

Party members will receive ballot packs during the first week in August and although they have until September 2nd to vote, about half are expected to do so right away. This gives Sunak little over a week to damage Truss’s credibility, fill out his own policy platform and dispel doubts about his suitability for the job.

[ Sunak suggests Truss would lose general election as poll puts her well ahead ]

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Next Monday’s debate on BBC television will be a crucial opportunity for Sunak, who outperformed Truss in both of the earlier debates. And while Truss’s team will attempt to shield her from media scrutiny, Sunak will seek out every opportunity to make his case.

Truss is an awkward speaker who has sometimes shown a slender grasp of policy detail in debates and interviews but she has a number of advantages which can help her to stay ahead. As the Johnson continuity candidate, she has stressed her loyalty to the outgoing prime minister and she has been rewarded with the backing of those who believe he was betrayed by Sunak.

Truss has the wildly emphatic support of the Daily Mail, which has been running pages of supportive stories about her and disparaging reports about Sunak. The Telegraph and the Spectator, the other two important publications for Conservative activists, have been more even-handed but she has supporters among the contributors to both.

A YouGov poll of party members on Thursday found that Sunak was viewed as less trustworthy than Truss

She has made much of her relatively modest background and her education at a comprehensive school in Leeds, contrasting it with Winchester College, the public school where Sunak was head boy. MPs report that many Conservative activists are uneasy about Sunak’s vast wealth, viewing his super-rich, international lifestyle as too remote from their own.

A YouGov poll of party members on Thursday found that Sunak was viewed as less trustworthy than Truss, perhaps because of his perceived role as Johnson’s assassin. But Sunak’s team will highlight Truss’s ideological twists and turns which have seen this former Liberal Democrat who backed Remain in the 2016 referendum transform herself into a strident advocate of the hardest version of Brexit.

The polls suggest that the contest is Truss’s to lose but Sunak’s team are confident that the Tory membership, who have shown themselves to be volatile in recent months, can be won round. The policy dispute between the candidates is so stark and fundamental that neither can expect a place in the other’s cabinet, which raises the stakes and could make the coming battle more brutal.