When Rishi Sunak lost to Liz Truss in the first Conservative Party leadership race of 2022, few were surprised. Many of the people given the chance to choose between the two candidates blamed Sunak for Boris Johnson’s downfall. They also preferred Truss’s “optimistic” economic policies to Sunak’s sombre assessment of the fiscal outlook. Where she promised generous tax arrangements, he argued that economic circumstances would be hard and taxes could not be cut in the short term. Indeed, he warned, they might even have to rise.
A few short weeks later and Sunak now finds himself taking over from Truss, vindicated for his criticisms of her tax plans. In the end, he was the only candidate to secure enough nominations to become leader of his party and therefore prime minister – a state of affairs partially driven by the need to avoid another divisive leadership contest. The Conservatives could not afford to continue projecting an image of disunity and chaos.
Johnson was briefly in the running for the job before announcing that he didn’t believe it would be right for him to return now. We may never know if he really did have enough nominations to stand, as he claimed.
