Liz Truss appears to have picked up an unassailable lead over Rishi Sunak in the race to become the next prime minister of the United Kingdom.
New polling has revealed that the foreign secretary’s favourability among Tory voters has shot up in the last few days, while the reverse is true for the former chancellor. Among members, she is 69 per cent to 31 per cent on to take the keys to Number 10. And as if that wasn’t enough, Sunak has already started to talk as if the race is over, saying he would rather lose the leadership contest than “win on a false promise”, which we all know is probably a falsehood in its own right.
To give Sunak his props, he has unquestionably run his campaign with more veracity than his opponent. He eschewed the “starry-eyed boosterism” that typified Truss’s approach to the economy and has been far more honest about what is in store in the coming months and years, which is starting to look increasingly bleak.
The International Monetary Fund has warned that the UK is set for the slowest growth of the G7 richest economies next year, while a leading investment bank has concluded that Britain will soon look more like an emerging market country due to its political instability, trade disruptions, energy crisis and skyrocketing inflation. There’s also the small matter of a climate emergency in play that could render all of the aforementioned issues null and void.
But, as the sun beats down, economic woes grow and retirees prepare to lose half of their state pension to energy bills, Tory members, seemingly, don’t want to hear any of it.
Liz Truss has set out her stall out based on the same sort of fantastical idealism that brought about Brexit, telling members that everything will be better if we slash taxes and reassuring them that Britain’s day in the sun is around the corner. The people who she will soon be rubbing shoulders with, Lord Frost, for example, say the evidence for a climate emergency does not exist and that we can frack our way out of the energy crisis. Meanwhile, she has remained stoically unmoved on offering help to those in need to deal with the cost-of-living crisis this winter, most likely because 63 per cent of Tory members oppose shifting funds to the less wealthy, a trick Sunak has tried to capitalise on too, let us not forget.
The trouble is that the people who will select the next prime minister of Britain are the same people who have been driven into a fantasy cult by Boris Johnson, and rather than admit things aren’t all they’ve cracked up to be, they are bunkering down and driving harder at the myths and mistruths that landed them there in the first place.
I put this to an American friend of mine recently as I tried to explain how divorced from reality our general political environment has become, and she had an apt analogy for it. In her words, it’s a little like when you take a wrong turn in the car, and rather than turning around, you convince yourself that there’s an alternative route that will allow you to keep heading forward.
That’s where we currently find ourselves, and with Liz Truss at the helm, expect more mindless voyages into the abyss.
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