UK leadership race: Why Conservatives backed Truss over Sunak

A year ago, Rishi Sunak was the runaway favourite to be the next Tory leader, with Liz Truss polling only a third of his support. He started the contest in front in surveys of members and won the parliamentary stage of the race comfortably.

After a month of campaigning, the results are out, and so is Sunak. Foreign secretary Liz Truss won and she is now the new prime minister. The result is not so unexpected. Nearly halfway into voting by Conservative Party members, less than 1% of the British electorate, some nine in 10 say they had already made up their minds. What happened?

Or, rather, what part of whip-smart, decent, teetotalling, hard-working, married-to-his-sweetheart, fiscally responsible and conservative Sunak did Tory members not like? Some wonder whether Britain is just not ready for a prime minister from an ethnic minority background: Sunak is of Indian-origin. It's a fair question, though it doesn't really explain the full picture here.

As Boris Johnson said bitterly in his last parliamentary address, "when the herd moves, it moves". A cynic would say that Cabinet hopefuls among MPs have hopped off the fence to the side where the grass looks greener. Even Penny Mordaunt - who was eliminated in the parliamentary stages amid allegations that the Truss camp had leaked damaging documents - backed the foreign secretary. But that explains the momentum, not why it's gone Truss's way.

One obvious factor is the person not in the contest - Boris Johnson. His own MPs ended the affair after a series of scandals, but many party members have had second thoughts. Johnson's supporters portray Sunak's resignation as the event that tipped the scales against the PM. Sunak had a hard time shaking his casting as Brutus to Johnson's Julius Caesar. Many Tories clearly struggle with the idea of handing the crown to the man who wielded the knife.

Another ghost haunting Sunak the candidate is 'Sunak the chancellor'. It's very difficult for a Conservative former chancellor who raised taxes - to the highest level in four decades - to campaign as a tax-cutter. There is also a sense that he raised the wrong taxes - his national insurance increase hit both working people and their employers - that he made the system much more complex, and that he didn't manage to fund reforms of social care. Many conservatives also suspect that he's perhaps a little too dogmatic and too deferential to the Bank of England, whose mandate Truss wants to revisit. "He's too clever by half" is a comment you hear from Conservatives, which pretty much dooms a candidate.

On an emotional level, Sunak's message of fiscal responsibility didn't go well against Truss's Johnsonian message of optimism amidst all the grim news. Truss makes it all gloriously, improbably, simple: slash taxes, borrow where needed and watch growth return. She dismisses as "not inevitable" the prolonged recession that the Bank of England has forecast. She had managed to position herself as the successor of Johnson's Brexit-y boosterism while also the candidate of change.

This may be the first leadership campaign in many years that hasn't focused on Europe, but Brexit still looms in the background. The right of the Tory party thinks Sunak's more emollient style and desire to avoid further strain on the economy will lead to compromise over the Northern Ireland Protocol, which Johnson was determined to rewrite. They had thrown their backing behind Truss, who declared that the only language Europe understands is the language of strength. That backing filters through to the party's grassroots and, crucially, helped win her the support of the two newspapers that matter most to this electorate: the Telegraph and The Daily Mail.

Sunak's tactics had often seemed all wrong for this race - more suited to a general election. Announcing a plan to cut VAT on fuel just looked like Truss-lite. A pledge to cut income tax in seven years looked out of touch when people are worried about energy bills in seven weeks.

Outside the economic portfolio, he looked less comfortable than Truss. Pledging to expand the definition of extremism to include those who "vilify Britain" was intended to look tough on crime, but looked tough on free speech instead. Telling voters in affluent Tunbridge Wells that, as chancellor, he changed funding formulas that had "shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas" so that "areas like this" can get more funding was Christmas come early for the Labour Party's social media team.

Truss's name used to get an eyeroll in the Westminster bubble. But as polling expert and University of Strathclyde Professor John Curtice told Spectator TV, "Liz Truss's narrative is working - the empathetic, ordinary girl who grew up in Paisley and went to a comprehensive school."

Rishi's narrative, by contrast, now seems to work against him, which wasn't the case a short time ago. As one of the youngest-ever chancellors and a rising star in the party, he was referred to affectionately as "Dishy Rishi" (British slang for a man who is attractive).

He wrote the checks that kept people afloat during the pandemic. Now his first name sounds too much like "rich", which he is. His expensively tailored suits and his wife's tax status made him seem far less relatable when so many face a cost of living crisis. The fact that he once held a US green card - which meant he pledged to eventually live in the US - before returning it when he was chancellor, still gets cited as a reason to withhold trust.

Truss had made a few campaign mistakes but that didn't matter in the end. Being so far ahead so early in the voting appeared to backfire and Tories have named the next prime minister and it's not to be Sunak, the immigrant's son. The only question is whether they will come to regret it.