Why Rishi Sunak shouldn’t quit

We are in the depths of silly season. The perfect time, then, for the Conservative party to be choosing a new prime minister on our behalf. The latest especially silly twist to the plot is the idea that Rishi Sunak, the almost certain loser, should somehow 'quit' the Tory leadership contest right now to enable Liz Truss to be installed earlier than 6 September. Lord Dannatt, the former head of the British army, has said Sunak should step aside to avoid a 'trouncing' and let Liz Truss crack on with the challenges facing Britain.

Given that ballot papers with his name on alongside that of Truss have already been issued – and many thousands of them presumably returned – it is unclear how this quitting could actually take effect. There is an election in progress. Conservative members are voting in it. The results will be announced on 5 September, with the winner kissing hands with the Queen on 6 September.

Certainly Sunak could tell people not to vote for him and to back Truss instead, but the ballots would still need to be counted at the end of the process just to make sure they had followed that advice. Truss would not be in Downing Street even one day sooner.

Or do the proponents of this plan propose actually to abort the election mid-stream, declare all votes thus far received void and impose another coronation on the Conservative grassroots? To do that would involve having the new PM chosen not by 180,000 or so Tory members – in itself a pretty slender electorate – but via the demands of those stuck for something eye-catching to write in the dog days of August.

Let us suppose for a moment that this far-fetched notion did happen, that Sir Graham Brady, with the consent of Sunak, popped up on the television today and simply announced the election was being cancelled and Liz Truss would be on the next train to Balmoral to seal the deal with Her Majesty.

For starters, it would involve Sunak breaching a written commitment given by the candidates not to pull out of the contest prematurely. Does anyone think the Tory grassroots would thank him for snatching away their opportunity to exercise the greatest privilege membership of the party brings?

Hardly. In fact there would be an outcry. Not only would he cement in place his position as the new pantomime villain of Conservative politics, but Truss would be deprived of a powerful mandate from her party. Instead of winning by a ratio of at least two-to-one, as polls currently predict, and going into conference season as the new darling of the grassroots, her premiership would begin as the result of a machine politics stitch-up – born with a whimper, not a bang.

Opposition parties would make hay with this. The public image of the Tory party would surely tend towards the memorable phrase used by Prince Charles to describe the Chinese Communist Party a generation ago: a group of appalling old waxworks.

What would be gained in return for all this pain? Well, Truss could in theory get down to tackling the cost-of-living crisis as PM three weeks earlier than otherwise planned. Yet the key measures she will propose for that will come in an emergency Budget that must await the resumption of the House of Commons following the summer recess. The date for that? Monday 5 September. The very day the Tory result is due to be announced anyway.

It is highly likely that a senior Tory MP backing Truss – probably Kwasi Kwarteng – already knows he will become Chancellor in a Truss Cabinet and is working on the outline of such a Budget statement to be delivered on or around Wednesday 7 September.

So pulling the plug on the Tory race, depriving Truss of grassroots legitimacy and appearing to let banana republic style machinations rip through the process of choosing a new prime minister would not advance government policies to deal with the energy crisis and related crises by a single day.

What many senior Conservatives are really worried about is the unpleasant and vicious nature of the final phase of the leadership election. Team Rishi in particular is leaving hostages to fortune scattered around – no doubt to be picked up by Labour at a later date – in the shape of wholly disproportionate attacks on Truss and her priorities.

Sunak himself has branded her policies 'not moral” and not Conservative. He has said in terms that she is a certain loser to Labour. His most senior MP backer, Dominic Raab, has described her programme as an 'electoral suicide note', inviting comparisons with Michael Foot’s doomed and extreme Labour manifesto of 1983.

This is stupid politics from the Sunakites. It is akin to being 4-0 down in a football match in injury time and instead of accepting defeat gracefully going around elbowing opponents in the face and performing leg-breaking tackles.

The impact of such thug behaviour is likely to bring about an even greater margin of victory for Truss. Why? Because Conservative members will fiercely resent the idea that desperate attempts to revive Sunak’s career merit inflicting such gratuitous damage to the party’s prospects under her leadership.

Cabinet wise owl Ben Wallace captured this thought the other day when remarking: 

'I’d say a gentle warning to Rishi’s camp that blue-on-blue is not going to help the Conservative Party win the next election.'

In the end the tactics of Team Sunak are down to Team Sunak and the consequences will in the main be theirs to face as well. The more Labour makes of his mal-mots, the less will be the chance of him and his most ardent followers rebuilding their political careers after his impending defeat.

Starmer recounting Sunak’s assessment of Truss, or indeed Raab’s, will only really sting if either of them are sitting in her Cabinet rather than in exile on the backbenches.

Delivering – and being seen to deliver – a sound beating to Sunak will allow Truss to register in the public consciousness as a force to be reckoned with. Depriving her of such an opportunity would be of no assistance whatever to her or her party.

Roll on September and a return to serious politics.