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British PM candidate Rishi Sunak walks next to his campaign headquarters in London.
It's Rishi
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is set to become the UK's next prime minister as the only candidate with support from more than 100 MPs in the Conservative Party leadership race.
Sunak's only declared rival, former defense chief Penny Mordaunt, bowed out right before the 2 pm BST deadline on Monday when it became clear she wouldn't meet the threshold and after many of her supporters urged her to make way for Sunak. The former finance minister will take over from Liz Truss, who threw in the towel last Thursday after the markets — and even the IMF — soured on her plans to cut taxes to stimulate the economy without spending cuts to balance the budget.
Sunak has his work cut out for him: steer the UK through a looming recession in the coming months, aggravated by a cost-of-living crisis and an energy crunch made worse by Russia's war in Ukraine. On the foreign policy front, he'll likely be less combative with the EU, stay the line on Russia-Ukraine, and get tough(er) on China. If he does a decent job, the Tories have a shot at stopping the opposition Labour Party from winning an absolute majority in the next parliamentary election, which should be called sometime in mid-2024.
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UK: Truss out, lettuce see what comes next?
In the end, poor Liz Truss didn’t even outlast that head of lettuce. At best, she stuck it out for barely four “Scaramuccis.” There are many ways to clock the downfall of the UK prime minister, who resigned on Thursday morning after just 45 days in office, marking the shortest premiership in British history.
Now the UK, which has already had three PMs in as many years, will have had three in less than two months. For a European country that’s not Italy, that’s a lot. And there is no guarantee that things will calm down anytime soon.
“A total and utter shambles, just complete carnage,” is how Mujtaba Rahman, head of Europe research at Eurasia Group, described it mildly.
To refresh: Truss — a Thatcherite chosen by Tory party members to succeed Boris Johnson after his own scandal-driven resignation — got into trouble fast with a major tax cut proposal. It was meant to spur economic growth in an early 1980s kind of way, but fears about its fiscal impact on the UK meant it spooked financial markets in more of a late 2000s kind of way. The pound got crushed so badly that alarm bells rang at the IMF.
Although she shelved the proposal and fired her chancellor for good measure, Truss was unable to stop the bleeding politically, and out came the knives. After the loss of another key official earlier this week, the writing was on the wall — by Thursday morning, Truss simply read it aloud.
Who comes next? Truss pledged that a successor would be in place within seven days. There are thought to be three frontrunners at the moment:
- Rishi Sunak, a centrist technocrat and former chancellor of the exchequer who lost to Truss in the last selection process and openly opposed her tax cut proposals.
- Former Foreign Secretary Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the lower house who finished third behind Truss and Sunak.
- Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, a fiercely anti-immigrant politician popular among the Tory party’s broader membership.
Current Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has ruled out competing and will stay in his post. He is, after all, due to present a full fiscal plan on Oct. 31. Boris Johnson’s name has also come up — he’s still popular with the party’s base — but Rahman says that while he has some momentum, the former PM may still have too many enemies among party MPs to mount a comeback for now.
Who chooses? The Tories have to work out a succession process that includes party MPs as well as the 170,000 or so party members among the public.
But the politics of those two groups are very different. Conservative Party members nationwide tend to be older, whiter, maler, and much more conservative than the party’s MPs in Parliament.
“If they have a say,” says Rahman, “it moves the center of gravity away from the centrist candidates and much more towards the extremes.” That would hurt Sunak and Mourdant, while opening a path for Braverman.
Tory leaders in parliament have said they will “consult” with Tory party members, but as of this writing, it’s unclear what that means. It could mean agreeing on a list of candidates and presenting it to party members for an online vote. There are also rumors of a “coronation” deal in which the second-place vote-getter among Tory MPs steps aside, all but eliminating the chance for the broader party membership to have a say.
Tory leadership is in a bind: To stabilize the UK’s financial situation, party leaders will want to hand the reins to a safe, centrist pair of hands. But marginalizing party members could provoke a backlash that cripples the Tories and courts further political upheaval.
Buckle up: The next head of lettuce — or 0.7 Scaramuccis if you will — is going to be a wild one in the UK.
For more on this, check out Ian Bremmer’s Quick Take on the “shortest-lived, most shambolic premiership in British history” here.This article comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.
Liz Truss resignation ends most shambolic premiership in UK history
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here. Breaking news waits for nobody as I'm in a car on the way to a very early morning flight on the West Coast in the US. But no, Liz Truss has resigned.
We all knew it was coming, but of course, she gets to pick the actual moment of 44 days. Shortest-lived, most shambolic premiership in British history. And I mean, truly coming at a horrible time for the country. The economy is in free fall. Inflation, much worse than in the United States. An energy crunch coming this winter. You thought that the Boris Johnson premiership was bad, and it was certainly clownish. There were lots of scandals. But in terms of policy at least they were much more coherent, if not always correct than Truss' month and a bit.
The big issue, of course, is that she decided to triple down on Brexit. No, we haven't done Brexit well enough. It hasn't really been tried. We haven't focused enough on growth, and so we're going to massively expand every failed policy in the midst of an enormous crisis. We don't have the population or even the Conservative Party behind us. Pretty much every part of her historic effort at an economic and a fiscal policy was defenestrated. That's right, thrown out of a window.
First, the tax cuts on the wealthy and then when her chancellor was forced out, forced to quit, Kwarteng, in also humiliation, but not as much as the prime minister. Let's be clear. It was her plan he was implementing. Jeremy Hunt comes in much more capable and basically undoes every single piece of what she promised she wouldn't U-turn. So a U-turn on a U-turn on a U-turn. They call that a roundabout in the UK. They drive on the wrong side of the road, but nobody gets it done the way Prime Minister Truss had.
We are delighted to see the back of her, of course. No one could possibly be less fit for this job, including the well-feted head of lettuce The Daily Star had been rooting on to outlast the prime minister for over a week now. It was of course a joke at the beginning, but now it's her premiership that gets the last laughs as it were. Likely to be either Rishi Sunak or Penny Mordaunt as the next PM, both Conservative Party challengers for her race that she ended up winning but vastly more competent and capable, more stabilizing in this environment.
The Conservative Party is in its death throes right now. I mean, some 20% approval, and it's just fallen off a cliff since Truss became the premier and it wasn't doing that well before that. But because there's no need for an election anytime soon, the Tories can soldier on. I mean, all of these home secretaries, all of these chancellors, all of these premiers, and then of course, on top of that, the news that we thought was going to be the big news in the UK is the fact that Queen Elizabeth passed away, and there's a new King. Well, it turns out that's old news in UK politics. My thanks to our special relationship that we never refer to it as such anymore across the pond for even for a small period of time making Americans think that is another advanced industrial democracy that can be even more poorly run than the United States.
That's it for me. I hope everyone's well and I'll talk to you all real soon with the next premier.
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