Insiders admit the race to become the next British Prime Minister is headed for ‘Five-Star Catastrophe’, #Insiders #Admit #Race #UK #Prime #Minister #Headed #FiveStar #Catastrophe Welcome to OLASMEDIA TV NEWSThis is what we have for you today:
The race to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader and thus Prime Minister has quickly turned into a Rorschach test designed to discover all the different ways Britain’s Conservatives are miserable.
In Rishi Sunak, the former finance minister, members of the conservative party see a man disloyal to Johnson leading the exodus of cabinet officials, ultimately leading to Johnson’s downfall earlier this month. Worse, they see him as disloyal to the principles of what it means to be a conservative. In Liz Truss, the incumbent Secretary of State, they see a decaffeinated Margaret Thatcher who will do anything to come to power.
The polls suggest that one of them would lose the next general election.
Rishi Sunak arrives at the Science Museum to attend a cabinet meeting on the sidelines of the Global Investment Summit in London on October 19, 2021.
OLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty
The British ruling party came to this sad ultimatum when Boris Johnson accidentally kicked off a new leadership race when he shot himself in the foot over the latest *attack scandal to haunt the party. His ill-treatment gave Johnson’s conservative colleagues the perfect excuse to tell him to go for decency, claiming that their sudden loss of patience with him had nothing at all to do with devastating recent election results, which showed their party was heading for the opposition benches in Westminster if he was still in charge at the next general election.
Johnson became the latest victim of a time-honored Tory tradition: bringing down their own leader while in government. Now the UK needs a new Prime Minister. You would think such a crucial Democratic question would be answered by the British people in a general election, but no. Instead, for the third time since 2016, it is up to the estimated 200,000 card-carrying members of the Conservative Party to decide who will be given unchecked power to rule the UK’s 67 million people.
Tory MPs (MPs) have already narrowed down an initial field of nine potential leaders to just two. Sunak and Truss are now hitting the road, campaigning across the country and taking part in TV debates before anyone is crowned leader on September 5.
The bickering among the wider pool of candidates in the early debates was so bad that party elders canceled the final debate so the rest of the country couldn’t watch the Tories tear themselves apart and destroy their record on live TV. There is hope – but no guarantees – that the live version will produce fewer fireworks.
The problem is that most conservative lawmakers and party members are far from enthusiastic about the latter two, or even the way the candidates were chosen.
“This particular contest was nasty, mean, personal and had nothing to do with policy,” said John Strafford, president of the Campaign for Conservative Democracy, a grassroots organization that aims to make the party more democratic. “Policy has been pushed aside, so all these personal ego trips that the MPs ride have emerged. It’s an absolute shame. It is a mockery of democracy.” The 80-year-old party veteran – who has been a member of the Tory since 1964 – says he would not vote for Truss or Sunak. But he hasn’t lost love for Johnson, who considers Strafford “the worst conservative leader of my life.”
Just a few months ago, the mega-money Sunak was a national hate figure. His support in the polls plummeted when he was found to hold a US green card — effectively declaring himself permanent in America for tax reasons — even while serving as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and, er, the tax authorities of the United Kingdom. all others increased. It also came out that his wife came out that his wife – who has an estimated $835 million in her billionaire father’s business – was claiming special tax status for British residents whose permanent residence is abroad.
Left: Margaret Thatcher; Right: Liz Truss
Photo illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/No. 10
And Truss is certainly not without its downsides. She is seen as insignificant in some parts of the party and the public, and has sowed her own self-sabotaged embarrassment. In January, she had to admit she had spent an indefensible $600,000 in government money on a private jet trip to Australia. And she’s also been called out repeatedly for deliberately trying to impersonate Tory hero Margaret Thatcher in an inappropriate, years-long campaign of photo ops. (Note, images of Sunak also shocked – it’s hard to comprehend how small he really is – 5ft6 – until you see him standing next to another human.)
A video of Truss giving a fist-cracking speech at the 2014 party convention has also gone endlessly viral during the leadership campaign. “Truss knows nothing about economics,” a former Conservative minister told The Daily Beast. “She’s all crazy and weird. I think she would be completely out of her element.”
Reports have also appeared in the British press accusing Truss of deliberately leaking documents to the press intended to embarrass her opponents during the leadership race. Some leading party figures are concerned that Truss is adept at being attractive enough to appeal to Tory members enough to win the race, but then lead the Conservatives to ruin in the expected 2024 general election. Sunak can break through the members and appeal enough, or Truss can succeed in her easy way, and we end up with an absolute five-star catastrophe,” said one veteran lawmaker. “It’s pretty grim. I think we are heading for the opposition at this rate.”
Incredibly, there is even a contingent of Tory members and lawmakers who are against both Truss and Sunak because they believe Boris Johnson is the best person to become the next Conservative leader and Prime Minister. “There was almost a coup to get rid of Boris,” Conservative MP Michael Fabricant told The Daily Beast. The staunch Johnson supporter says he believes the British are frustrated that the Conservative party has “become like lemmings throwing themselves off a cliff. Why do we do that instead of continuing to run the country? It’s completely self-indulgent.” Fabricant backs Truss because of his dislike of Sunak, partly informed about what Fabricant calls “the loyalty issue” – meaning Sunak betrayed Johnson.
However, if polls are to be believed, Sunak certainly seems less popular with Tory members than Truss, in part because of his policies, which some argue are not conservative enough. His critics have attacked his reputation as Britain’s Chancellor or Chancellor of the Exchequer. Truss likes to point out that under his care the tax burden is highest in 70 years. Government loans also exploded as economic activity collapsed amid COVID lockdowns. Worse for Sunak’s reputation in Downing Street, he is the only candidate for leadership who has refused to promise tax cuts if he becomes prime minister. Thank the gentleman for voting for Brexit in 2016 – unlike Truss – otherwise he would be completely at odds with Tory sentiment, the received wisdom reads. Though even on Brexit, Truss seems to be favored by *Eurosceptics since she racked up a total of 180 on her former pro-European stance.
“The person with the real understanding of policy that was the class act in some ways was Rishi,” said Lord Henry Bellingham, a former Conservative lawmaker now in the House of Lords, speaking the morning after asking Sunak and Truss for support. watching them compete on a hunt for conservative gentlemen. “I think Rishi’s big problem is that he’s the chancellor in charge of some pretty significant tax hikes. He explained to us exactly why he had to do it, and he also told us very clearly that he is instinctively a low-tax conservative, but he still has a long way to go. [prove] That.” Bellingham, who will vote for Truss, added: “I think Liz will win because she has more support from the party faithful. On the other hand, if those general public polls indicate that Rishi is more likely to to win the elections in the fight against [Labour leader Keir] Starmer, more likely to save the UK in terms of challenges [Scottish First Minister Nicola] Sturgeon, then I think that will be a factor.”
Even with Truss ahead at the moment, it’s still all to play for in the lead up to September’s result. It remains to be seen how much damage the Conservative Party does to itself in the process of getting there. As a former minister puts it, the wider electorate is not so impressed with the “cheap and superficial judgments” used in the race over who is and who isn’t. Real Conservative, while the country faces a series of truly monumental challenges.
“I mean, we’ve reached the point where people say, ‘For God’s sake, there are much bigger problems,'” says the Tory insider. “We have a global resource crisis, we have the war in Ukraine, we have social disadvantage and people can’t pay their bills. These scary statements are only intended to appeal to factions in the Conservative party and are potentially disastrous for the party in government.”