If someone was to tell a political spectator 5 years, 1 year, or even 6 months ago, that the leadership record of a British prime minister would be compared around the world to a wet lettuce live streamed on YouTube; one hopes the only response would be disbelief. As of the 21st of October 2022, however, the lettuce has won and the conservative party is onto its 3rd leader in 3 months. Once famed for the boredom it instals, the British political system has been turned on its head, and has had its head chopped off on multiple occasions for a variety of complex and baffling reasons.
Although Johnson’s departure was an epic political sager, for the here and now, we need to focus on the fall of Liz Truss. Upon the announcement of his resignation on the 7th of July 2022, Johnson initiated an internal race for the head of the conservative party. The winner of this contest would automatically become Prime Minister, and leader of the largest party in Parliament. Two major candidates emerged as voting among members of Parliament decided who could stand in the election; Lizz Truss and Rishi Sunak. With Sunak winning the most votes among MP’s, with 137 against 113 for Truss, with various other candidates collecting below them. Upon the announcement of the two candidates on the 20th of July, less than 2 weeks after Johnson announced his resignation, the decision was now taken to the people. Like all great political tussles however, there was a twist. In this case, the only people who were able to vote in the leadership election for the conservative party were the 130,000 paying members of the conservative party, and not the 48.8 million people in the entire electorate.
Going into the short election cycle Rishi Sunak appeared to have the lead, with the largest share of the conservative MP’s support, and numerous polls showing him with far higher name recognition and approval ratings across the country. This is largely due to his work as Chancellor of the Exchequer during the covid pandemic. Unfortunately for the Sunak tea, the make up of conservative voters is predominantly older, white, and wealthy and to the right of the party, and as a result, Lizz Truss’ tax cutting small stake politics won. This led to her election as Prime Minister, on the 5th of September 2022.
To her credit, as soon as she came into office, Truss got to work in implementing the fiscal policies she ran on. Truss’s chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced the biggest tax cuts in 50 years on the 23rd of September, worth £45bn, without the usual independent costing from the Office for Budget Responsibility. Truss said it was a “fiscal event” rather than a budget, so the OBR did not need to be consulted.
It later emerged that Truss had not told the Bank of England about her tax plans. The huge increases in government borrowing sent sterling, and British government bonds, into freefall. The IMF called for a reversal in policy and the Bank of England had to urgently buy up to £65bn of gilts to protect pension funds that were teetering on the brink of collapse. The markets had rejected Truss' vision for the UK’s financial plan, and her premiership and the UK economy were on the ropes.
Truss and Kwarteng were forced to reverse their planned cut after howls of indignation from their party and opposition from the public. In the ultimate political backstab, on the 14th of October, Truss sacked her chancellor and long-time political ally Kwarteng, bringing in the well known moderate Jeremey Hunt to replace him. Hunt would go on to scrap almost all of the fiscal plans previously laid out.
From this point on, Truss was doomed; her ideas for the country had been rejected by the markets, tanking the British economy. The power of the UK government was clearly in the hands of Hunt. The writing was on the walls, and MP’s knew it, Truss had to go. Six days after she had fired her chancellor and a day after she had given a speech in the House of Commons, claiming she was a “fighter not a quitter”, Truss resigned on the 20th of October 2022. The conservative party was in crisis.
Deciding they could not survive a general election, or another long drawn out leadership battle, the party agreed to the rules of its next leadership race. The party decided that the MP’s would pick the next Prime Minister, not the people. Names flew around the halls of Parliament about the replacement, with one of these names being the disgraced PM, Boris Johnson, who had been holidaying in the Caribbean and quickly flew home. The race was on to collect 100 MPs' support.
Three candidates emerged in the days after Truss’ resignation: Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the house of Commons for the conservative party at the time. Hour by hour MPs picked sides with the looming question whether Johnson was actually running. The party, however, was done with the political infighting, rejecting Mordaunt, as she failed to get the one hundred MPs needed. Johnson, under much pressure, announced he was not and was never planning to run despite his clear intent. This left one, Rishi Sunak, rejected by the people, but forced in by the members of parliament; he achieved the one hundred necessary supporters and took the position of Prime Minister on the 25th of October. His only mandate came from 193 conservative MPs out of 650 in the House of commons, and the financial markets. Sunak has a broken economy, a failing health service, and a cost-of-living crisis all to deal with, alongside an electorate and party where most made it known that he was not wanted.