Why Liz Truss will be Britain’s next prime minister

Sadly for Rishi Sunak, Conservative Party members aren’t looking for a boring Indian accountant to carefully steer the economy

There’s a simple answer to why Liz Truss will be Britain’s next prime minister: all the surveys of Conservative Party members so far show she would beat Rishi Sunak.

This is true even after last night’s BBC debate between the two. Although a poll taken immediately after the debate showed both of them basically level-pegging, Truss was ahead among people who voted Conservative in 2019.

So, barring any big slip-ups from the Truss campaign, she should be our next prime minister.

But hold on a second, you might say, Liz Truss? Really? That woman who got really angry over cheese? The one who gave perhaps one of the most cringeworthy speeches in British political history? The one who voted to Remain in a party dominated by Brexiteers?

Why is Truss more popular among Tories, even though she is more unpopular across the country? Why, when Rishi Sunak was just recently the most popular politician in the country, is he floundering against Lacklustre Liz, as our editorial put it?

I think that’s the big question. Here’s my theory.

The Conservative Party isn’t looking for someone to carefully steer the economy, or they would have chosen Rishi Sunak. He is saying everything a Conservative prime minister, such as David Cameron, would say: we need to tighten our belts to pay down our Covid debt. We need to balance our budget and fight inflation, first and foremost. I don’t agree him, but this is what I expect a traditional Conservative to say. And it was clear at the BBC debate he had a far better grasp of economic issues than Truss.

The Conservative Party isn’t looking for a boring Indian accountant, they are looking for a culture warrior who is willing to fight on other fronts. And that’s where Sunak is floundering. His hurried plan to tackle immigration came too late and was simply not believable enough.

The former Conservative MP Paul Goodman, now editor of the party’s grassroots website Conservative Home, wrote this week: "I suspect the winner of this contest will be the candidate who best captures the Badenochian vibe – and convinces Conservative activists that they will make Britain a more conservative country if elected."

I believe he is right. I wrote last week that, for Conservatives, Brexit was primarily a social issue, so they would want a candidate who was willing to fight on that front. And that candidate is Liz Truss, who managed to get the support of the party’s preeminent culture warriors: Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Earlier, that candidate was Kemi Badenoch, but now it’s definitely Liz Truss.

This is why, during his tenure, Boris Johnson kept on focusing on the Brexit dividing line, was happy to privatise Channel 4, took up the cause of fighting “the woke” and doubled-down on deporting refugees to Rwanda. These were all culture-war issues that Brexit voters lapped up. Of course economic “levelling up” mattered too, but it wasn’t the only project that kept the Brexit flame alive.

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And this is why it doesn’t matter whether Liz Truss’s economic plans make no sense, or that Rishi Sunak is seen as more trusted on the economy – those aren’t the priorities.

This is clearly a problem for the country, since we will soon have a prime minister more focused on stopping asylum seekers coming here than dealing with the cost of living. In fact Truss may even make Britain’s economic crisis worse, especially if she follows through with her plan of cutting taxes. That would very likely raise inflation and therefore interest rates, and cost people higher mortgages, as Sunak repeatedly pointed out.

Liz Truss would undoubtedly be a worse prime minister. But the silver lining is that she would also ruin the Conservative reputation for managing the economy and – likely – lose the next election. In the meantime we would all pay for their recklessness.