Who will be Liz Truss’s successor? Let us get Ready for Rishi

Sunak remains the best-qualified candidate, and his warnings against the party choosing Truss turned out to be hopelessly polite and understated

Liz Truss’s farewell speech was just as flat as we had come to expect. Short, factual, with nothing personal about it. She couldn’t claim to have left any kind of legacy, after just 44 days, apart from having made a bad economic situation worse. So she just had to accept there was no point in prolonging the agony.

Her only responsibility on the way out was to make sure that the succession would be quick. Which was presumably why she asked to speak to Sir Graham Brady, the keeper of the rules, before making her announcement. So Sir Graham, the chair of the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs, made his secondary announcement 45 minutes later, confirming that the leadership election would be carried out within a week.

He even said that the “expectation” was that Tory members would take part, presumably in an online ballot, but I wonder if this isn’t a show designed to make the members feel respected, and the actual expectation is that whichever candidate comes second will withdraw from the contest before the members’ stage.

With a timetable this short, Sir Graham’s intention must be to set a high threshold for nominations to ensure that there are only two or three candidates, and therefore the need for only one or two rounds of MPs’ voting. If, for example, the threshold were set at 119 nominations, one-third of the number of Tory MPs, there could be only two candidates. They would probably be Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, and it might be that Sunak would attract so many nominations that no other candidate would make it onto the ballot paper, as Gordon Brown did in Labour’s equivalent election in 2007.

Either way, if the members’ vote is not needed, we could have a new prime minister on an even shorter timetable. As I wrote this morning, I think most Conservative members would be satisfied with that outcome: the idea that most of them would be furious at being cut out of the election, or at the elevation of someone they inexplicably regard as a socialist backstabber, has been overdone.

A YouGov poll of Tory members on Monday and Tuesday found that 60 per cent of them would support the MPs choosing a single candidate without a leadership election – and the same proportion said that Sunak would be a “good replacement” for Truss.

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Jeremy Hunt has ruled himself out, booking his permanent slot as chancellor. But there are other candidates. The most hoo-ha will be made about Boris Johnson, who has signalled from his holiday in a hitherto unknown island in the Caribbean, that he is available to be recalled to serve his country in its hour of need – an hour that he did so much to bring about.

If the 1922 Committee has any sense, it will set the threshold high enough to exclude him, which shouldn’t be too hard, because he doesn’t have a large base of support among MPs. Indeed, if he did stand, the first question he will be asked at the hustings will be how he expects to appoint enough ministers to make a government, given that so many of them resigned when he was in charge. The second question will be about the privileges committee inquiry.

Kemi Badenoch, Ben Wallace, Grant Shapps, Suella Braverman and others will think about it, but they will probably fall by the wayside. Sunak remains the best-qualified candidate, and his warnings against the party choosing Truss turned out to be hopelessly polite and understated.

The Conservative Party has already reversed the result of the leadership election in policy; it remains to complete the U-turn by appointing the right candidate at the second time of asking.