Several other MPs too switched sides. Meanwhile, Liz became stronger with her moves as the race progressed…reports Asian Lite News
Rishi Sunak had an advantage as he threw his hat early in the ring and was endorsed by four former chief whips, but within weeks, he started trailing behind the late-comer Liz Truss
Touted as the favourite initially for the race to Downing Street, Rishi Sunak started losing his spark midway. Sunak had a huge advantage as he threw his hat early in the ring and was endorsed by four former chief whips, but within weeks, he started trailing behind the late-comer Liz Truss in the UK prime ministerial race.
‘Ready for Rishi’
Hours after Boris Johnson announced his resignation, Sunak threw his hat into the ring with a campaign video titled ‘Ready for Rishi’. Even though it gave him the initial advantage, the act was a thorough mark of trust deficit in his boss and mentor.
Wow! Thank you to everyone who came to support Rishi in last night’s hustings
Moreover, even as he gained massive support from his party at first, he started losing them including Sajid Javid, Nadhim Zahawi and then, finally, Mordaunt. Several other MPs too switched sides. Meanwhile, Liz became stronger with her moves as the race progressed.
Apart from that, even though Sunak became popularity shot up immediately after Johnson’s resignation, his image to be a backstabber was never forgotten.
Why did Sunak become unpopular?
Rishi Sunak’s image was permanently tainted when a video of his came into foray where he accepted that he took money from deprived urban areas. His comments, boasting of shifting money from “deprived urban areas” to fund projects in the Kent commuter belt sparked outrage, considering it cut across the UK government’s rhetoric about ‘levelling up’ Britain and spreading wealth beyond the south-east.
Things turned worse when reports claimed that his wife Akshata is wealthier than British Queen Elizabeth II with assets worth £430 million, according to Sunday Times Rich List. In fact, they were mentioned to be Westminster’s first billionaire couple, probably enjoying the largest fortune of any House of Commons family. Their finances came under scrutiny as Labour party called him to be more transparent regarding loans he took to fund his businesses.
The Guardian reported, Rishi was forced to explain details about how he managed his family’s fortune, which is said to total £730million. His fortune’s are derived from his marriage to Akshata Murthy, who owns a 0.93% stake worth £690m in Infosys.
Sunak comes in support of Truss
Thank you to everyone who voted for me in this campaign.
I’ve said throughout that the Conservatives are one family.
It’s right we now unite behind the new PM, Liz Truss, as she steers the country through difficult times.
Hours after he lost the race, Sunak showed his support to Liz Truss. “It’s right we now unite behind the new PM, Liz Truss, as she steers the country through difficult times,” Sunak said on Twitter.
If Truss comes to power, she will be the third female Prime Minister of the UK after Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and Theresa May (2016-2019)…reports Asian Lite News
Boris Johnson’s successor as the next UK Prime Minister will be revealed on Monday when either Liz Truss, the incumbent Foreign Secretary, or Rishi Sunak, the former Indian-origin Chancellor, will be named as leader of the ruling Conservative Party.
The name will be announced at 12.30 p.m. (around 5 p.m. IST) and the winner of the leadership race will take office on Tuesday after being formally appointed by Queen Elizabeth II, reports the BBC.
If Truss comes to power, she will be the third female Prime Minister of the UK after Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and Theresa May (2016-2019).
If Sunak wins the race, he will make history as the first ever Indian-origin to hold the post and the the UK.
Tipped by pollsters to emerge as the winner, Truss has promised to announce further help to shield consumers within a week of taking over, says the BBC report.
She also plans to deliver 30 billion pounds in tax cuts through an emergency Budget later this month, arguing the UK’s tax burden is behind sluggish growth.
The Foreign Secretary is yet to offer details of her cost-of-living support plan beyond saying she will temporarily scrap green levies on energy bills and reverse the rise in National Insurance introduced during Johnson’s tenure.
While still hopeful, Sunak has signalled he believes he has lost, saying his job “now is just to support a Conservative government”.
The seven-week leadership contest will bring an end to Johnson’s turbulent three years in office, with Monday’s winner set to inherit a flagging economy, with inflation at a 40-year high, the BBC reported.
Johnson was forced out in July by a ministerial revolt over a string of scandals, just over two-and-a-half years after leading the Tories to a landslide victory at the 2019 election.
Although Sunak had the most support among Conservative MPs, he has trailed Truss in opinion polls of the party grassroots.
Johnson is expected to deliver a farewell speech upon leaving office on Tuesday, before the handover of power takes place.
Foreign Secretary Truss has in contrast emerged as a favourite in the vote of grassroots Tory members, the result of which will be announced next Monday…reports Asian Lite News
Liz Truss will become Britain’s third female prime minister if she wins the Conservative leadership election, while rival Rishi Sunak hopes to be the first non-white incumbent in Downing Street.
The campaign, sparked by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation in July, has highlighted the pair’s differing approaches to tackling the country’s spiralling cost of living crisis.
Sunak, whose resignation as finance minister over a series of government scandals helped to spark the leadership contest, is considered a better public speaker.
But he has come under fire for clinging to fiscal orthodoxy to tackle runaway inflation and has been hamstrung by his image as a wealthy technocrat.
At the same time, he has faced accusations of treachery for bringing down the Tories’ Brexit hero Johnson.
Foreign Secretary Truss has in contrast emerged as a favourite in the vote of grassroots Tory members, the result of which will be announced next Monday
“She’s a better politician,” said John Curtice, a political scientist at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.
“If you ask me what Liz Truss’s campaign was about I will immediately say to you: ‘a tax cut not a handout’. Very clear,” he said.
“There is no strapline for Sunak, nothing.”
For Curtice, Truss has effectively conveyed “traditional Conservative messages” to Tory members while Sunak has been more nuanced.
“It’s also a bit of a lecture,” he said, assessing that Sunak has come across as “a wee bit brittle” under pressure.
“You can see that she’s been in the game for longer,” he added.
Political journey
Truss, 47, has described her ascent towards the top of British politics as a “journey” that has seen her criticised for being ambitiously opportunistic.
She comes from a left-wing family and initially joined the centrist Liberal Democrats before jumping ship to the right-wing Conservatives.
She became MP for the South West Norfolk constituency in eastern England in 2010, surviving revelations of an affair that almost cost her the nomination.
Since 2012 she has held a series of ministerial posts in the education, finance and departments as well as a difficult spell in justice.
In 2016, she campaigned for the UK to remain in the European Union but quickly became one of its strongest supporters when Britons voted for Brexit.
🇬🇧 Thank you to the thousands of @Conservatives backing my vision to unite our Party and unleash the full potential of our great country.
🗳 I'm counting on your vote to get our economy growing and win the next election.
When the UK left the EU, Johnson put her in charge of negotiating new free trade deals before appointing her as foreign secretary last year.
In the role, she took on the controversial task of trying to overhaul differences with Brussels about post-Brexit trade in Northern Ireland.
Like Johnson, she has talked tough on Russia and given unswerving backing for Ukraine.
Truss’s dress sense and photo opportunities — posing in a tank in Estonia and wearing a fur hat in Moscow — have earned her comparisons to Tory icon Margaret Thatcher.
Her sometimes stiff style has become visibly more relaxed and allies have sought to soften her image, revealing her love of karaoke and socialising.
Establishment elite?
“For a party that’s gone in quite a populist direction in recent years, she’s been able to present herself as more authentic, more ordinary than Rishi Sunak, who is all too easily presented as part of the global elite,” said Tim Bale, from Queen Mary University of London.
“Like Boris Johnson, she is keen on the idea that there is some kind of elite that has to be countered and she sets herself up as being outside the establishment, despite having been in government for eight years.”
Sunak, 42, the grandson of Indian immigrants, grew up as the son of a doctor and a pharmacist in Southampton, on England’s south coast.
He attended the prestigious fee-paying Winchester College school, then Oxford University.
Truss, who went to a state school in Leeds, northern England, also studied at Oxford. Both studied politics, philosophy and economics.
Sunak met his wife, Akshata Murty, whose father founded the Indian tech giant Infosys, at US university Stanford before jobs at Goldman Sachs and investment funds.
A huge thank you to all @Conservatives members coming to support Rishi across the country👏
This week, Rishi has been meeting members from Newbury to Norwich, Huntingdon to Harlow, Birmingham to Bedfordshire and beyond
He has represented the constituency of Richmond in northern England since 2015, where he was soon marked out as a potential future prime minister.
He became finance minister in early 2020, quickly winning plaudits for spearheading government support to people and businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
But Sunak, a self-confessed geek with a love of Star Wars, saw opinion turn against him this year, after it emerged that his wife did not pay UK tax.
Critics have also used his private wealth, expensive clothes and houses to portray him as out of touch with the ordinary public.
Both she and her rival, Rishi Sunak have claimed to be Thatcherites who in the 1980s, refused to bail out struggling coal mines and steel production…reports Asian Lite News
The fate of Tata Steel’s UK business has shifted to the next British Prime Minister who has to take a decision on whether to grant a 1.5 billion pounds ($1.8 bn) subsidy to the company or let it shut down.
This was indicated by business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng after Tata chairman N Chandrasekaran warned on Friday that the subsidy to the British steel plant is necessary within the next one year to keep the steel plant in the UK operational or the plant will close down.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak leaves the Prime Minister Boris Johnson weekly Cabinet Meeting inside No10 Downing Street on his way to deliver his 2021 Budget to the House of Commons. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street
The Financial Times reported on Saturday that Kwarteng’s stance is significant because he is tipped to be the next chancellor if foreign secretary Liz Truss becomes premier when a new Tory leader is announced on September 5. Interestingly, Truss has campaigned to reduce the size of the state and cut taxes. Both she and her rival, Rishi Sunak have claimed to be Thatcherites who in the 1980s, refused to bail out struggling coal mines and steel production.
Tata Steel’s UK facility has manufacturing capacity of 5 million tonnes, which employs 8,000 people, while the Netherlands facility has seven million tonnes capacity and employs 9,000 people. The Southeast Asia operations has another 1.7 mt capacity. The UK and the Dutch operations are housed under Tata Steel Netherlands. Tata Steel UK needs the subsidy to reduce carbon emissions at its Port Talbot facility by building electric arc furnaces and closing the two blast furnaces in the UK and stopping primary steel production. Arc furnaces on the other hand recycle steel and are less carbon intensive than the blast furnaces, the FT said.
Analysts at rating firm Moody’s recently said given the lack of vertical integration at Tata Steel’s European operations and the wide swings in the business’ profitability in previous years, they remain cautious in the forecasts and assume that the business’ earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) per tonne will decline from $180 in fiscal 2022 to around $140 -$150 in fiscal 2023 and further slide to $40 -$50 in fiscal 2024. Also embedded in this assumption is Moody’s view that inflationary pressures and volatile energy costs will likely prolong through the ongoing fiscal year.
Analysts said in the fiscal year ending March 2002, Tata Steel Europe’s operations have witnessed a considerable turnaround with an EBITDA per tonne of Rs 13,741 for the year 2022 (the company had made an EBITDA level loss in previous year). The company had maintained the volume at nine million tonnes as compared to 8.8 MT reported in previous year. This is mainly on account of the strong rebound demand from the European markets and improvement at realisation levels. In the second half of fiscal 2222, deficit in the European steel market on account of China going into second lockdown and declined production by the Chinese players owing to policy restriction was picked up by other players, including Tata Steel Europe which has resulted in the improvement performance at TSE level.
“However, going forward, the performance of TSE will be a key monitorable in terms of the rating perspective,” rating firm Care said early this month.
The attacker reportedly plotted the assassination of the 67-year-old former head of government for nearly a year…reports Asian Lite News
The Japanese government has scheduled the state funeral of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for September 27, local media reported on Friday.
The ceremony will take place at the Nippon Budokan arena in the Kitanomaru National Garden in Tokyo, the Kyodo news agency reported. Notably, the last time the country held a state funeral for a national leader was in 1967 for former prime minister Shigeru Yoshida.
Abe was shot on July 8 in the Japanese city of Nara during his campaign speech. Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, approached the politician from behind and fired two shots from a distance of about 10 meters (33 feet).
The attacker reportedly plotted the assassination of the 67-year-old former head of government for nearly a year.
Abe sustained two gunshot wounds to the front of his neck and the bullet that killed him damaged his heart and a major artery, causing blood loss, Hidetada Fukushima, the head of emergency services at Nara Medical University Hospital said. According to Dr Fukushima, Abe went into cardiopulmonary arrest at the site of the attack and lost vital signs during transportation, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Doctors attempted a blood transfusion after they were unable to stop the bleeding, Dr Fukushima said. Shinzo Abe arrived at a hospital without any vital signs after being shot during a campaign speech in western Japan.
Abe, Japan’s longest-serving Prime Minister, stepped down in 2020 citing health reasons. He was Prime Minister of Japan twice, from 2006-07 and again from 2012-20. He was succeeded by Yoshihide Suga and later by Fumio Kishida.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida earlier in his live address to the country said “this is not a forgivable act,” and that authorities would “take appropriate measures to handle the situation.”
Kishida further said that the motive behind Abe’s shooting is not known. The media outlet citing government sources also reported that Abe’s shooting suspect is an ex-member of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces.
Shinzo Abe, who had been the longest-serving Japanese prime minister, was a friend of India whose tenure saw the bilateral ties gain new strength and depth and whose strategic vision left a deep imprint on the global stage.
A charismatic leader, who was the first Japan Prime Minister born after the Second World War, Abe left a lasting economic legacy in Japan which became famous as ‘Abenomics’. (ANI)
Former head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi (Xinhua/Lu Yang/IANS)
Mattarella had asked him to remain as caretaker leader until early elections, expected this autumn…reports Asian Lite News
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi officially resigned on Thursday after he failed to revive his coalition government, putting an end to his national unity government after 17 months in office.
Draghi told President Sergio Mattarella that he failed to reunite his coalition government as three parties in his government refused to back him in a confidence vote on Wednesday, BBC reported.
Mattarella had asked him to remain as caretaker leader until early elections, expected this autumn.
Draghi, 74, was dubbed Super Mario for his handling of the eurozone crisis as head of the European Central Bank.
However, a week ago, one of the parties in his government refused to back his economic package prompting a political crisis.
Sunak is now all but certain to be one of the two candidates on the final ballot for Conservative party members, media reports said…reports Asian Lite News
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak on Tuesday hung on his lead in the race to select the next leader of the Conservative Party – and the Prime Minister, extending his lead in the fourth round to nearly a third of all votes.
Sunak secured 118 votes, three more than in the fourth round, while both his challengers – Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss remained in double digits, the BBC reported.
It was curtains for Nigerian-origin, former Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch, who came last with 59 votes and drops out.
Sunak is trailed by Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt with 92 votes, 10 more votes since Monday, and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss was third with 86 votes, having gained 15 votes.
The final round will be on Wednesday leaving just two candidates, and then, it is Conservative Party members around the country, who will make the final decision, to be announced on September 5.
Sunak is now all but certain to be one of the two candidates on the final ballot for Conservative party members, media reports said.
He is now on 115 votes and once a candidate gets 120 (just over a third of the total), it is mathematically impossible for two other candidates to get more votes. Sunak is also particularly well placed to pick up many of the 31 Tom Tugendhat votes now up for grab; Sunak, like Tugendhat, presents as a mainstream pragmatist, not an ideological rightwinger, the Guardian reported.
Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt are now the two strongest candidates in the contest to be the second person on the final ballot. One recent survey suggested both would beat Sunak in the final poll, but Truss more comfortably than Mordaunt, it said.
Almost certainly, Sunak’s chances would be better against Mordaunt; her lack of experience means the risk of her campaign imploding under scrutiny remains high (over the last week her popularity has already fallen significantly), and Truss, unlike Mordaunt, would be guaranteed the support of the Tory right en masse.
Kemi Badenoch looks likely to be eliminated on Tuesday afternoon. It is not inevitable – she has defied expectations already – but she remains 13 votes behind Truss, and may struggle to get much of the Tugendhat vote. If she does fall out, her votes will be for grabs on Wednesday – and would decide whether Sunak faces Truss or Mordaunt, which could in turn determine who gets elected as the next PM, The Guardian reported.
Former equalities minister Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat, chair of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, also remain in the running but trail the others in support from Conservative lawmakers…reports Asian Lite News
British foreign minister Liz Truss clashed over tax policy with former finance minister Rishi Sunak on Friday, as the five remaining contenders to be Britain’s next prime minister went head-to-head in the first of three televised debates.
An initial field of 11 challengers has been whittled down following two days of votes by lawmakers from the ruling Conservative Party.
While Sunak has topped those two votes, he faces stiff competition from Truss, who has the backing of a number of senior figures, and junior trade minister Penny Mordaunt, who polls suggest is the most popular with party members who will decide the winner.
Former equalities minister Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat, chair of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, also remain in the running but trail the others in support from Conservative lawmakers.
A snap poll by market research company Opinium of the British public showed Tugendhat was viewed as the best performer by 36% of viewers. Sunak came second on 24%, followed by Mordaunt and Badenoch on 12% and Truss at the rear on 7%.
Former equalities minister Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat, chair of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, also remain in the running but trail the others in support from Conservative lawmakers.
A snap poll by market research company Opinium of the British public showed Tugendhat was viewed as the best performer by 36% of viewers. Sunak came second on 24%, followed by Mordaunt and Badenoch on 12% and Truss at the rear on 7%.
#IEWorld | British foreign minister Liz Truss clashed over tax policy with former finance minister #RishiSunak as the five remaining contenders to be Britain’s next prime minister went head-to-head in a televised debate.
“We have to be honest, borrowing your way out of inflation isn’t a plan, it’s a fairy tale,” Sunak told Truss.
Truss said tax rises would undermine business investment just as the economy was faltering. “You cannot tax your way to grace,” she said.
Johnson, who resigned as the leader of the ruling Conservative Party on July 7, has been urging defeated Tory leadership candidates not to back former chancellor Sunak, who is widely blamed for Johnson’s loss of support among his own party members, The Times newspaper reported.
“The whole No 10 [Downing Street] team hates Rishi. It’s personal. It’s vitriolic. They don’t blame Saj [Sajid Javid] for bringing him down. They blame Rishi. They think he was planning this for months,” the newspaper quoted a source as saying.
All five candidates will clash in a television debate on Sunday before the third round of voting set on Monday, when Conservative MPs will further narrow down the field as the candidate with the least votes is knocked out of the race until only two remain.
Sunak and Braverman’s fellow Indian-origin Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, chose to sit it out…writes Vikas Dutta
It could be called democracy’s diversity, or even colonialism’s counterblast. The race to succeed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson by becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party, which espoused the Empire, imperialism and British national identity, has been swamped with contenders from former colonies in Asia and Africa. And at the end of the preliminary rounds, the son of immigrants from British East Africa was on top.
Rishi Sunak, UK’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Finance Minister, whose sudden resignation set in motion the circumstances that forced an intransigent Johnson to finally bow out, has emerged the main contender at the end of two rounds of voting by the 358 Conservative MPs.
Picking up a quarter of the votes in the first round, he became the only one to get over three digits in the second round — and is followed by three women present and former ministers.
The initial race had a ethnically diverse list of candidates — British Pakistani ministers Sajid Javid and Rehman Chishti, Sunak’s Iraqi Kurd-born successor Nadhim Zahawi, Attorney General Suella Braverman, whose family’s roots are in Goa, and Nigerian-origin former minister Kemi Badenoch.
Sunak and Braverman’s fellow Indian-origin Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, chose to sit it out.
Javid and Chishti failed to get enough traction to even figure in the race, Zahawi bowed out after the first round, and Braverman after the second, leaving Sunak and Badenoch to contend against Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, and Tom Tugendhat, the backbench MP, who happens to be half-French.
It’s early days for Sunak, who has emphasised that identity of a person born in the UK but with origins elsewhere matters to him. He has to remain in the reckoning till there are only two contenders left in the race, at which point the decision will be left to the rank-and-file Conservative Party members across the cities, shires, hills and dales across the British Isles.
🔴 Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Tom Tugendhat, Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt will now come under intense scrutiny as they go head-to-head on national television this evening
Suave, efficient, but also controversy-ridden, the former US-based investment banker, hedge fund operator, and three-time MP still has a chance to become the first non-ethnic Briton to become Prime Minister.
This, though, will not be entirely unusual — for such staunch British PMs as Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan happened to be half-American (on their mothers’ side) and Johnson was born in the US, becoming the first non-UK-born Prime Minister since Andrew Bonar Law nearly a century ago (Bonar Law, however, was born in Canada, which was a part of the Empire.)
Born in Southhampton on May 12, 1980, Sunak is the son of (the then British) Kenya-born Yashvir Sunak and his wife, Tanganyika-born Usha, who grandparents were born in the Punjab Province of British India, and migrated to East Africa, and from there to the UK in the 1960s.
“My parents emigrated here, so you’ve got this generation of people who are born here, their parents were not born here, and they’ve come to this country to make a life,” he said in an interview with the BBC in 2019.
“In terms of cultural upbringing, I’d be at the temple at the weekend — I’m a Hindu — but I’d also be at (Southampton Football Club) the Saints game as well on a Saturday — you do everything, you do both,” he said, also revealing that he was fortunate not to have endured a lot of racism growing up, save for one incident, when he was with his younger siblings.
With his father a general practitioner, and his mother, a pharmacist, he had an easy childhood. He studied at a prep school in Hampshire, and then he was at the prestigious Winchester College, where he was head boy and editor of the school paper; during vacations, he worked at local curry restaurant.
Oxford was the next stop and he graduated in 2001. The same year, he was interviewed along with his parents for the BBC documentary “Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl”. He was an analyst at investment bank Goldman Sachs till 2004, and then a hedge fund management firm till 2009, when he left to join former colleagues at a new hedge fund launched in October 2010.
In 2009, he married Akshata, daughter of Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy and writer Sudha Murthy, who’s also the chairperson of the Infosys Foundation. Sunak and Akshata have two daughters.
Engaged with the Conservative Party since his Oxford days, Sunak got into politics full-time in 2014 when was selected for the Richmond seat in north Yorkshire — one of the safest Conservative seats, which has been held by the party for more than a century — and won it in the 2015 elections by nearly 20,000 votes.
He retained it in the 2017, and 2019 elections, with increased majorities. His predecessor as Richmond MP was William Hague, now Baron Hague of Richmond, who held important cabinet position, Including Foreign Secretary, and was Leader of the House of Commons,
A staunch proponent of “Leave” in the Brexit referendum of 2016 and subsequent parliamentary votes, Sunak’s first government job was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government (2018-19) in the Theresa May government and then as Chief Secretary to the Treasury (2019-20) in the government of Johnson, whose leadership bid he had supported.
Thank you for your continued support.
I am prepared to give everything I have in service to our nation.
Together we can restore trust, rebuild our economy and reunite the country.
He replaced his boss Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020, and while he mostly earned plaudits for steering the government’s economic response to the effects of the Covid-19 lockdown, he also became the first Chancellor to be found to have broken the law while in office by breaching lockdown norms.
His wife’s non-domicile status, which let her save huge amount of taxes in the country, also became a major controversy for him.
It is Sunak’s “treachery”, which set off the spate of resignations that forced Johnson’s resignation, that may just queer his chances to become Prime Minister.
And a poll on Wednesday, perhaps pointing to the desire for a fresh break from the recent part, caused an earth tremor among political journalists…reports Asian Lite News
Mordaunt, 49, campaigned for Brexit and was the first woman to serve as defence secretary, although Johnson sacked her shortly after he became prime minister in 2019 because she had backed another candidate for party leader, Jeremy Hunt. She also held the international development brief in cabinet, and is currently a junior trade minister.
The MP for Portsmouth North since 2010, Mordaunt’s career before politics was largely in public relations. The colourful aspects of her background include a stint as magician’s assistant while at college, serving as a Royal Navy reservist and appearing on the Tom Daley-fronted diving show, Splash.
She is seen as a safe bet, or a compromise candidate that marries Brexiteer bona fides with the kind of socially liberal views that were ushered in by David Cameron as leader, having spoken at a pro-Leave LGBT event during the referendum.
While never a rank outsider, Mordaunt has been put in the second-tier of leadership hopefuls because of better name recognition among other candidates. But what might have started as a curse may turn into a blessing if the likes of one-time chancellor Sunak and foreign secretary Liz Truss are tarnished by their association with the Johnson era.
And a poll on Wednesday, perhaps pointing to the desire for a fresh break from the recent part, caused an earth tremor among political journalists.
Let’s remember, once MPs have whittled the field down to two candidates, it’s up to between 100,000 and 200,000 party members to choose the winner. And the YouGov survey showed Mordaunt is now the clear favourite for leader among these Conservative members.
Some 27% responded that they would favour Mordaunt as Johnson’s replacement, with former minister Kemi Badenoch second on 15%, and Sunak and Truss tied on 13%. Perhaps more significant was how she would beat every rival – comfortably – in head-to-heads.
The poll’s revelations – which came after her campaign’s launch event – were followed by the second place in the ballot and a handy advantage over Truss, who was seen as a candidate more likely to unite the party’s factions.
Backroom negotiations will now take place before the next round of voting, and any number of pacts and promises could yet deny Mordaunt a spot in the final two. Her higher profile will also bring much more scrutiny than she has experienced before.
But once they’ve finished telling you about “momentum”, commentators will doubtless recall how David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith were also not supposed to win the Tory leadership. In other words, all to play for.
