A commenter at Dominick Cummings substack points out something obvious that the UK media, despite the massive coverage it has dedicated to the Conservative Party’s leadership battle, has not even mentioned:
Implied odds from bookmakers
Liz Truss – 75.8%
Rishi Sunak – 23.8%
Seems to be bearing out exactly as anticipated with Sunak popular among MP’s but quite unpopular among party members due to his high taxation, high spending HMT record plus a slice of members feel some loyalty to Boris.
The real contest was always who made the final two with Rishi. Curiously the MP’s never seemed to realise this?
The smart play for any Tory MP’s was to form a small block and support Rishi up to the penultimate round and then switch support as a block to another candidate in exchange for some future power.
But none of them did anything like that, those supporting Rishi assumed he could win the members vote.
It was the Mordaunt / Truss camps arm wrestle over Kemi Badenoch’s supporters that happened last week, that decided the next PM.
Badenoch to Mordaunt is a weird move from right the centre. The more natural switch was Badenoch to Truss. Mordaunt really needed to pick up some of Sunak’s supporters but the Mordaunt camp, nor the Sunak supporters seemed to figure this out.
The delta was 8 MP’s. So a block of ~10 MP’s could have negotiated quite a lot of power for themselves. If they played this contest correctly. But we just don’t see that kind of decentish competence anywhere in contemporary politics, it’s really weird.
Now Sunak gets to lose to Truss instead of Mordaunt. We could speculate that Truss will probably put Sunak to the sword, whereas Mordaunt would probably have had Rishi in government.
Rishi Sunak is the new David Miliband.
Truss is the new PM.
Alarmingly the Conservative Parliamentary party hasn’t got a single competent politician in it, not one, not one MP who can navigate a simple leadership contest by forming a small block and negotiating power.
Incompetence… or irrelevance? I would argue the latter.
Mordaunt was well ahead of everyone in the one-to-one polls, including Truss, until the media began hammering her for her very questionable flip-flops on trannyism. This is why, despite her support for Brexit, the MPs began leaving her in favor of Truss, despite Truss being a lunatic neocon-controlled Remainer.
But how did that happen? WHY did it happen? Because the globalists needed Truss to win and they control the UK media. Mordaunt was the potential danger, because being a fame-whoring, post-ideological populist, she would almost certainly have reduced Britain’s support for the only globalist program that now matters, the war in Ukraine. Losing Britain meant losing Italy, Spain, France, and probably Germany as well, leaving only the USA, Poland, and the Baltics to fight Russia, China, and the rest of the world.
Sunak is a globalist creature through-and-through, but he was never going to win because he’s Indian, he’s not British.
Modern politicians are incompetent – see Creepy Joe Biden – but more importantly, they are entirely irrelevant. This is not merely a post-ideological age, it is a post-political one.