Rishi Sunak to soon replace Liz Truss as UK PM? Conservative voters want to
Due to Liz Truss’ catastrophic first month in office, conservative MPs are already preparing to replace her as party leader, according to a senior tory leader.
Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt are two MPs who Paul Goodman, the editor of ConservativeHome website, reported were being considered as potential successors to the prime minister.
It follows Ms. Truss’s first budget, which saw the pound fall and mortgage and government debt interest rates rise.
The comments came after Conservative Party lawmakers blasted Truss on Wednesday evening for pursuing a strategy, they said benefits the wealthy at the expense of the working class voters who handed the party a landslide victory in 2019. Truss has “trashed the last 10 years of workers’ Conservatism,” British news organizations quoted Robert Halfon, chairman of the House of Commons Education Committee, as saying.
The government argues that the proposed tax cuts will stimulate economic growth, which will in turn generate increased tax revenues to pay for public services.
But investors are concerned because Truss’ Conservative government hasn’t provided any independent analysis on how the plan will affect borrowing and debt levels.
A poll released of Tory heartland seats in the south of England saw Labour capturing swathes of the party’s safe ‘blue wall’ seats, while national polls but Liz Truss’s party twenty to thirty points behind the opposition.
“All sorts of different people are talking about all sorts of different things because the Conservative backbenchers are casting around for a possible replacement for Kwasi Kwarteng, even for a possible replacement for Liz Truss,” said Mr Goodman, a former Tory MP himself.
“All sorts of names are being thrown about, Rishi Sunak, even Boris Johnson, Kit Malthouse, Sajid Javid.
“But one idea doing the rounds is that Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak, who, after all, between them got pretty much two-thirds of the votes of MPs, come to some kind of arrangement and essentially take over.”
Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak both ran again Liz Truss in the Tory leadership contest, which the prime minister won just a month ago.
Sunak in particular used the contest to warned that Truss’s economic policy – which is based on ideas promoted by right-wing think-tanks – would lead to economic disaster.
Asked if any bid to replace the current Tory leader would be decided without the party members, Mr Goodman said: “Yes, I suppose the arrangement would be to come to an agreement about one candidate so the members are a cut-out.
With inputs from agencies
