Good morning. After Boris Johnson’s unbelievably long goodbye and a Westminster campaign to succeed him that has occasionally felt like a knife-fight in a clown-car, Tory MPs have finally whittled the candidates for the Tory leadership down to two: Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.
Penny Mordaunt had briefly seemed like the prohibitive favourite, but her ultimate defeat to Truss in the race for second place has felt inevitable for at least the last few days. Now about 160,000 Tory members (too late for you to join and vote, alas) must choose whether they would prefer the next prime minister’s most famous howler to be about disgraceful foreign cheese or a range of different breads.
Today’s newsletter, which I swear is the last one on the Tory leadership for a bit unless Sunak joins the SNP or something, is about what we can expect from the next six weeks. As Truss might say, we’ll hit the ground right after the headlines.
Five big stories
Sri Lanka | Newly-appointed president Ranil Wickremesinghe vowed to crack down on the protests that toppled his predecessor Gotabaya Rajapaksa, condemning them as “fascist”. Protesters fear Wickremesinghe, an ally of the Rajapaksa family, will stop his predecessor being held accountable.
Nuclear energy | After numerous delays, the UK government has given the green light to the new Sizewell C nuclear power plant in Suffolk. In January, the government invested £100m in the project.
Climate | The UK must learn to live with extreme weather, a minister has said, as the government was accused of going missing “while Britain burns”. Kit Malthouse, the Cabinet Office minister, was speaking after more than 60 homes were destroyed in wildfires during Tuesday’s record high of 40.3C.
HRT | Hormone replacement therapy will be sold over the counter for the first time in the UK after approval by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
Monarchy | The Charity Commission is to take no further action over cash donations totalling €3m accepted by one of Prince Charles’s charities. The donations made by a former Qatari prime minister were reportedly handed over in a small suitcase and Fortnum and Mason carrier bag.
In depth: Truss v Sunak
If you thought the intra-Conservative vitriol had peaked already, you may be in for a more exciting summer than you had anticipated. After the first debate, Sunak is reported to have turned to Truss and asked “Why are we doing this?”; in the second one, they tore lumps out of each other. Now that they’ve been so witheringly rude about each other’s policy positions that they can’t possibly sit in the same cabinet, it’s all or nothing.
As they step into the ring, Ben Quinn has an essential primer on the two candidates. And here are a few key questions that are likely to get bad-tempered answers this summer:
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Can Sunak persuade Tory members he’s one of them?
While it may seem like an implausible problem for a former hedge fund manager and member of the Sunday Times Rich List who calls himself a “common-sense Thatcherite”, the former Chancellor has found himself repeatedly under fire for his insistence that now is not the time to cut taxes.
There is some research, laid out in an interesting piece this morning by Heather Stewart, which suggests that the membership are not as obsessed with tax as they are reputed to be. And yet Sunak’s persistently poor ratings in polls of the party membership suggest that the attacks may have bolstered a general sense that he is not quite the true blue they yearn for. Not for nothing does he write in the Daily Telegraph today: “I am a Thatcherite, I am running as a Thatcherite, and I will govern as a Thatcherite.”
Subtle it isn’t. (“Generally speaking, the Iron Lady impressions of this contest have leaned heavily on vibe,” Zoe Williams writes in her piece about the ongoing “Thatcher parade”.) In any case, you could forgive Sunak for being in a hurry to perfect his impression.
While regional hustings and media coverage will continue throughout the summer, he may have much less time than that to win hearts and minds: the first members get their ballots on 1 August, and they can send them back right away. (Peter Walker has a summary of the schedule.) The membership polls have oscillated quite a lot since the contest began, but that’s still not long to change a narrative that appears to have bedded in.
That’s why reports have suggested Sunak will frontload his campaign in the first fortnight. “Rishi will need to attack hard and fast,” one Tory source said yesterday, doing little for hopes of collegiality by adding: “He’s the underdog now and they fight dirtier.”
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Do Truss’s economic policies add up?
Economic policy isn’t wholly comfortable territory for Liz Truss, either. Immediate tax cuts to boost growth funded through borrowing when the country is in the grip of a cost of living crisis is a pretty radical approach – radical enough for Sunak to call it, somewhat implausibly, “socialism”. Truss’s promise to treat Covid debt as “an exceptional item” which doesn’t need to be paid off on the usual schedule may cause some concern for adherents of Tory “sound money” principles as well.
Truss starts things off this morning with an article for the Daily Mail in which she takes various sideswipes at Sunak, including a promise to reject “business-as-usual managerialism on the economy”.
By the same token that Sunak has an uphill battle, she appears to be on the easier side of this debate as far as the members are concerned – but head-to-head television debates will probably see her plans under greater scrutiny than in the madcap contest so far. And she is not always the most convincing performer under that kind of pressure. As Jessica Elgot points out in this analysis, she has rejected all broadcast interview requests during the Westminster phase – but that won’t work from this point on.
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Will the vote be a referendum on the Johnson years?
Sunak resigned; Truss didn’t. But while there has been some mileage for Sunak in being able to present himself as a man of principle, he has not found it easy to shake off the claims that he was motivated solely by personal ambition – an argument not made easier by reports that he registered a campaign website six months ago.
This is absurd – obviously they’ve all been thinking about it for ages! – but it gets at one of the ambiguous legacies of the Johnson era. YouGov research suggests that one of the most important attributes members are looking for in a new leader is honesty. What it can’t tell us is whether they see that as being better embodied in the man who was fined by police then belatedly took on a prime minister with a reputation for being economical with the truth – or in the woman who stayed on board with the Johnson project even when the house was falling down.
Either way, Labour’s attack lines are all about tying both candidates to their predecessor as closely as possible. Expect to hear the word “stooges” with unbelievably tiring frequency from the opposition for the next six weeks.
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Is Sunak David Cameron – or David Miliband?
If he has a good summer, Sunak will emerge as the first leader of the party to unify its modernising and Eurosceptic tendencies – a plausibly moderate figure who can appeal to the same parts of the electorate that made David Cameron prime minister. “Slick” is as irritatingly overused a descriptor for him as “forensic” is for Keir Starmer, but this ‘candid’ video his campaign put out last night does have a certain Cameroonian smoothness – the same combination of politeness and rolled-up sleeves.
But there’s another future for Sunak, hinted at by his possession of a US green card as Chancellor and persistent rumours he will stand down as an MP at the next election if he loses: another David, Miliband, who hesitated over a leadership challenge, eventually took a shot at it by tacking to the centre, and wound up spending the next decade in New York.
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Is Truss Margaret Thatcher – or Iain Duncan Smith?
The obsession with tax cuts and clunkingly obvious pussy bow tribute act suggest that she sees herself as the former, however many times Sunak invokes her name – and if nothing changes over the course of the campaign, the unified support of the right of the party may be enough to allow her to project the same impression from the steps of No 10 in September.
But her critics may remember another awkward right-winger who ascended to the party leadership against a more obviously electable opponent despite losing out in the MPs’ ballot. And things did not end well for the quiet man. Iain Duncan Smith is now one of Truss’ most prominent supporters.
What else we’ve been reading
Aditya Chakrabortty’s piece about how Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour bought up swathes of Manchester for peanuts is a bleak tale of Britain’s acquiescence to capital. “It was the council that held almost all the cards,” he writes of the deal – but “it was Sheikh Mansour who pocketed almost all the winnings.” Archie
Oliver Wainwright brilliantly pieces together how a £1.7bn office complex in London became a ghost town, writing: “It has the air of a bleak open-air prison for white-collar criminals sentenced to purgatory in a haunted business park.” Nimo
Sophie Benson is really interesting on the end of the free returns model in fast fashion, and whether this is a 5p plastic bag moment. Archie
Derecka Purnell persuasively argues why it is critically important for president Joe Biden to cancel student loan debt in the US. Nimo
Isaac Chotiner’s Q&A with Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz for the New Yorker is one of the all-time great car-crash interviews. Read it immediately, if only for a great anecdote about Larry David being rude. Archie
Sport
Euro 2022 | England’s women beat Spain in extra time to secure their place in the semi-final. Spain were the better side for much of the match, but a late equaliser from Ella Toone followed by a 96th-minute screamer from Georgia Stanway were enough for victory.
Golf | Pádraig Harrington has accused Henrik Stenson of doing “what he said he wouldn’t do” after the Swede was removed as Europe’s Ryder Cup captain before confirming his status as LIV Golf’s latest recruit.
Chess | The five-time world chess champion Magnus Carlsen has said he will not defend his title in 2023. Carlsen, the strongest and best-known player in the world, said he was not retiring but added of the championship: “I am not motivated to play another match.”
The front pages
“‘Blue on blog dogfight’ as Sunak and Truss face off” – the lead story in this morning’s Guardian. The Daily Mail senses victory and says “Truss: I’ll hold an emergency tax cut budget” – the aforenamed provides an “exclusive” column for the paper today. “Sunak: pick me or lose power” – that’s the Times but there’s little comfort for the ex-chancellor elsewhere as the Telegraph calls “Advantage Truss in the race to be PM”. The i has “Liz Truss new favourite to become PM”. The Financial Times renders it as “Truss starts as slim favourite over Sunak in two-way dash for No 10”. “Penny’s dropped” – the Metro finally gets the copy to match the headline after Mordaunt missed the cut. The Express commemorates the “last hurrah” for Boris Johnson who addressed his final PMQs. “Farewell Boris: parting shot at Rishi and a hint ‘I’ll be back’”. The Mirror tries a bit too hard with “Out of the lying man and into the dire”. Iit pegs the Tory final two as “Lighweight Liz Truss” and “Rich kid Rishi Suna”. The Sun shows the husband and children of “Bowelbabe” Deborah James at her funeral and the headline is “Love and miss you for ever”.
Today in Focus
How Covid keeps surprising us and confounding the experts
More than two years into the pandemic, the virus continues to evolve in unpredictable and surprising ways, says science correspondent Hannah Devlin.
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Some music venues that took a hammering during the pandemic are looking not to private investment but to community business models to stay afloat. The idea is simple: they want to place power and control in the hands of the local community through models such as charitable status social enterprises. The move to nonprofit structures has given some venues the financial room to invest in their properties – one venue has been able to install a second stage, new air ventilation and accessible toilets – and to plan further into the future than they have previously been able to. “We don’t want money going to private landlords,” says Mark Davyd, of the charity Music Venue Trust. “We want it in the cultural economy, because that’s the way we generate more great artists and give more people the opportunity to be involved in music.”
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
