Trailing Truss Among UK Tories, Sunak Says He Has Broader Appeal

Kitty Donaldson
5 min read
2

(Bloomberg) -- With Liz Truss seemingly on course to be Conservative Party leader and the next UK prime minister, her opponent, Rishi Sunak, is pinning his hopes on undecided Tory members and the difficulties in polling them.

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The odds are firmly against the former chancellor, whose resignation last month helped trigger Boris Johnson’s demise. According to a YouGov survey this week, he has to overturn a 34-point lead for Truss among Tory members just as they start to receive their ballot papers. The foreign secretary’s pledge to cut taxes and decision not to quit Johnson’s Cabinet have proved popular.

For Sunak, that means playing catchup in a race that still has four weeks to run, before the winner is announced on Sept. 5. His first task is to persuade the 12% of members who, according to YouGov, have not yet made up their mind, and then try to build momentum from there.

One of them was Lisa Rowe, who arrived at Wednesday’s hustings in Cardiff, Wales wearing two stickers on her T-shirt: “Liz for Leader” and “Ready for Rishi.” The 55-year-old homemaker from Southampton said she was interested in their economic policies as well as how they would take back powers from the European Court of Human Rights -- a polemical issue for many Tories.

“I’ll be watching their body language,” she said.

Sunak is increasingly trying to draw a distinction between the Tory membership and the wider electorate, arguing he is better placed to counter Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour Party, which leads in most national polls.

Looking at Labour

“I know you will talk to your friends who are not necessarily members, you’ll stop people in your communities to get their view,” Sunak said in Cardiff. “I’m confident that when you ask people that question, they will say to you that I’m the best person to lead this country at this time.”

The strategy is to get Tory members looking past the current contest to the next general election, due in January 2025 at the latest but likely sooner. At a conference center in front of about 300 people on Wednesday, the argument appeared to hold some sway -- at least among the undecideds.

“The electability is a big thing for me,” said Sam Ashdown, 30, who works in credit insurance. “There is a sort of toxicity to Liz Truss to non-Tory party members. If you ask my colleagues or Labour-supporting friends, they wouldn’t waver to vote for Liz Truss but are more likely to for Rishi Sunak.”

It was a sentiment echoed by Nige Richards, a local Cardiff Tory association stalwart who said he had made up his mind by the end of the event.

“Liz is quite cuddly and folksy but you wouldn’t want her finger on the nuclear button,” the retired owner of computer systems business said. “She said a lot of good things but Rishi is more statesmanlike, more polished, more dynamic.”

Chasing the Leader

The problem for Sunak is the scale of Truss’s apparent lead and the fact that Tory members will soon start casting their votes, meaning he is fast running out of time to turn things around. Moreover, the proportion of members identified by YouGov as undecided suggests the numbers he needs aren’t there.

It’s also far from clear that given his record as Chancellor of the Exchequer, with the UK facing a cost-of-living crisis amid rampant inflation, Tory members would necessarily regard him as best-placed to defeat Labour next time. A survey for the influential ConservativeHome website of Tory members published Wednesday put Truss 32 points ahead of Sunak.

In Cardiff, Truss appeared more relaxed than early in the contest, making jokes about how she likes the James Bond theme song “Goldfinger” by Welsh singer Shirley Bassey. She tried to make a virtue of having previously been a member of another political party, and made light of a sudden policy U-turn this week that was the first clear misstep of her campaign.

Her strategy of rolling out policy after policy designed to appeal to the ideological right of the party, from immigration to police powers, reflects the fact that the contest will be decided by about 175,000 grassroots Tories. Despite campaigning to stay in the European Union during the 2016 referendum, she’s seen as more hardline support of Brexit than Sunak, who voted Leave.

Question of Polling

Still, an ally of Sunak insists his team remain upbeat, while downplaying the findings of the YouGov and ConservativeHome surveys. Instead, the person pointed to a Savanta ComRes poll published Sunday that suggested the two candidates are neck-and-neck among Tory councilors.

According to Chris Curtis, head of political polling at Opinium Research, polling Tory party members is notoriously difficult because the numbers make them hard to find. Many are older and not likely to be reached by online methods, while properly analyzing data is complicated by the fact that party doesn’t release information on ages or ethnicity, he said.

Curtis he said he has “never felt less confident in polling than during the Tory leadership race,” though he added that Truss’s comfortable lead means even a large survey error is unlikely to mean the race is called incorrectly. “I won’t be feeling so confident if we see the polls narrow.”

For Sunak to achieve that, he will need to use every public opportunity to persuade people, starting with the televised Sky News debate on Thursday.

But time is not on his side, and interviews with Tory members revealed that for many, his part in Johnson’s downfall will be the ultimate factor no matter what Sunak says or does in the coming weeks.

“I have decided, but it was a close thing,” Rowe, who arrived at Wednesday’s Cardiff hustings wearing two badges, said by phone on Thursday. “I still can’t move past what Rishi did to Boris and I don’t believe him when he talks about loyalty and integrity. I think he would be sound on the economy, but Truss is going to do something now for people.”

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