The Sunak plot thickens: who paid for the ‘Labour landslide’ poll?

The identity of the mysterious moneybags who tried to topple the PM with apocalyptic polling matters not just as a gripping political whodunit – it also has a bearing on the future of the Conservative Party, says John Rentoul

A plot to oust Rishi Sunak as Tory leader has only strengthened his hold on office (PA)

The plot thickens. It may have been the worst attempted leadership coup ever, with Rishi Sunak’s hold on No 10 strengthened and the Conservative Party’s image further tarnished – but it has the compelling watchability of a classic whodunit. And whodunit in this case is, in true Agatha Christie style, none of the colourful characters with an obvious motive who have already been introduced in this tale of dysfunctional Tories.

The Tory right is currently spawning more organisations than the Bennite left did when the Labour Party was going through a mirror image of today’s factionalism in the 1980s. Where then, on the so-called left, we had the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Rank and File Mobilising Committee, today on the so-called right we have the latest Liz Truss vehicle, Popular Conservatism (shortened to PopCon), and the Conservative Britain Alliance (CBA).

The CBA is organised by David Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator and a Daily Telegraph columnist, and it paid for the seat-by-seat megapoll that was designed to agitate for Sunak to be replaced. But the identity of the donor, or donors, who provided the CBA with the £20,000 or more needed to pay for a poll with a 14,000 sample remains a mystery.