The next UK Prime Minister

[Richard A]

Some may say it doesn't make any difference - no Tory leader is going to be a great improvement on BoJo. (Could they be worse - well ...). But now that we know for definite who the candidates are, an edit of and comment on Arneb's earlier list.

For those outside the UK who haven't followed, the intricacies, this is how the process works.

Round 1 (just completed): To get on the ballot, a candidate has to get 20 MPs to support them. (The membership of the Conservative party as a whole don't get a look in until later.). By the deadline of 18.00 tonight, 8 managed that.

Round 2: Voting by Conservative MPs. Any candidate who gets less than 36 votes is out. If they all manage that, then whoever gets the least votes is out.

Round 3, etc.: Rinse and repeat until there are only two left standing.

Final round: The membership of the Conservative Party as a whole vote, choosing from the final 2. The winner becomes leader.

Rishi Sunak, apparently a bit of a front runner, the former Chancellor whose resignation ushered in the final days of BoJo. Maybe that will prove his undoing, because some Tories apparently don't want the honourable Brutus to replace the slain Caesar impersonator.
Still a favourite with the bookies, though joint favourite now with Penny Mordaunt. Interestingly, although BoJo felt very bitter towards him, Johnson loyalists like Dominic Raab are backing him.

Sajid Javid, former Health Secretary and the other Brutus; his and Sunak's resignation letters were published 9 min apart, for maximum destructive effect
- didn't make the 20 supporters, so out.

Jeremy Hunt
Former Foreign Secretary. Interesting candidate. Kicked out of the Cabinet in Boris's purge of autumn 2019 as not sufficiently committed to Brexit. That won't play well with the Daily Mail, but it also means he's totally untarnished by the scandals of the last 2 years. (But rely on his opponents to remind us of the time he couldn't remember where his wife came from.)

Nadhim Zahawi. After BoJo, it might prove inconvenient to have an investigation for tax evasion on your heels. Especially when you are the current Chancellor of the Exchequer (that's Finance Minister, you uneducated rednecks!)
Committed to tax cuts across the board as necessary to boost the economy. Tax is shaping up to be the leading issue in the contest. Interestingly, came to the UK as a refugee - unlike the other non-whites, who were born here of families who'd established themselves in business. Arrived aged 11 as a refugee speaking no English. Will that give him sympathy for those in a similar situation now? (Priti Patel and Suella Braverman have both made it clear they have none at all.)

Tom Tugendhat, a liberal and anti-Brexit Tory, some isolated specimens still exist, but count on a first round exit.
Has moved his position on Europe to "let's take the opportunities of Brexit" rather than continuing to be anti-Brexit as such. But his key platform is making a break with the past - easy for him as he was never a minister. "A Clean Slate". Of all the candidates, if he made it, he'd be least likely to persist with tearing up the Northern Ireland Protocol - in fact, his approach to foreign policy (if not other issues) would likely be similar to Biden's in January 2021: trying to re-establish the trust his predecessor had lost.

Suella Braverman
Disappointing that she made it on to the ballot. Very similar in outlook to Priti Patel. Heaven help us if she becomes PM: the fable of the frogs, the rock and the crane comes to mind. Patel may well not have tried that hard to get the 20 signatures because she's hoping to be in a Braverman Cabinet.

Kemi Badenoch
Impressive at first - a great opening that she wouldn't make promises she couldn't keep (implication, unlike others). But look more closely and she's Braverman light. Re-labelled the gender-neutral toilets at her launch venue as Ladies and Gentlemen. Doesn't believe in critical race theory (despite her Nigerian origins). Might also fit well in a Braverman Cabinet. But would Braverman get a place in hers - the bookies like Badenoch more than Braverman.

Penny Mordaunt
Solid Brexiteer from the beginning, not a more recent convert. Seen as a solid candidate of the right. Neck and neck with Sunak right now.

Liz Truss (Foreign Affairs)
Although originally pro-Remain, a solid convert. Firmly in favour of ditching the NI Protocol. Seen (correctly) as a candidate of the right - but so are Braverman and Mordaunt. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries back her - possibly because she stayed loyal to Boris to the end.

The next trimming is tomorrow afternoon.

[Мастер]

Round 1 (just completed): To get on the ballot, a candidate has to get 20 MPs to support them. (The membership of the Conservative party as a whole don't get a look in until later.). By the deadline of 18.00 tonight, 8 managed that.

Is an MP restricted to supporting only one candidate?

[Richard A]

In any one round, yes. For the nomination process, you have to have a certain number of MPs' names - like with any nomination. And in each voting round, each MP gets one vote. However, if the person they vote for gets eliminated, then in the next vote they can and do vote for one of the survivors. And commentators were saying last night that many MPs will even now be working out what their order of preference is. Now in the Labour Party, the leadership election has one round (open to the entire membership - although now, as with the Tories, a candidate has to get the support of a certain number of MPs) but on a single transferable vote system: you indicate your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. choice and if your 1st choice gets knocked out, your vote is automatically transferred to your 2nd choice and so on. In the Conservative party, in contrast, you have a series of voting rounds and each MP votes for their preference from whoever's left.

A bit like my support during the 2006 FIFA World Cup. I supported England (of course). They got knocked out. So as I have family in Germany, I then supported Germany. They got knocked out. I had quite a few Italian colleagues, so I now supported Italy. Here the analogy fails as after they got knocked out, I didn't much care who won! But you get the point.

[Lianachan]

Here's a summary of the candidates from a Scottish perspective. I know the herd has been thinned already, but I've no idea who's gone and who's left as the whole thing is entirely irrelevant.

Rishi Sunak - cunt that nobody up here can stand.

Sajid Javid - cunt that nobody up here can stand.

Jeremy Hunt - cunt that nobody up here can stand, though he gets bonus points for being his own ryhming slang.

Nadhim Zahawi - cunt that nobody up here can stand.

Tom Tugendhat - cunt that nobody up here can stand.

Suella Braverman - cunt that nobody up here can stand.

Kemi Badenoch - cunt that nobody up here can stand.

Penny Mordaunt - cunt that nobody up here can stand.

Liz Truss (Foreign Affairs) - cunt that nobody up here can stand.

[Arneb]

^^Well, there's a bit of news that noone expected .

The rhyming slang twat is out, as is Suella Braverman. Javid didn't enter, so they have only three days of voting left to sling mud (or have it slung by their minions) at each other.

Richard, you are of course right re. Labour and Jews. I was in a stingy mood, and Labour's bout with antisemitism under Corbyn really had me riled up big time.

[Richard A]

I take Lianachan's point about the whole thing being completely irrelevant from a Scottish perspective. And I am no fan of the Tories - the few that might have lured me to the dark side have been weeded out a while ago. Thatcher would have called them "wets" and she has a fair few disciples in the current Tory Party. So my view is this. Whether I like it or not, one of this lot will be our next Prime Minister. Barring the completely unforeseen - and I admittedly didn't see BoJo's removal coming quite so quickly and suddenly as it did, especially after he survived the confidence vote - I won't get a chance to vote for a better government until mid to late 2024. So my approach is: which of these would be least bad. Suella Braverman's exit did provoke a sigh of relief: her as PM, Priti Patel as Home Secretary and I dread to think who as Attorney-General and Justice Secretary was a truly scary prospect. Some of what Badenoch had to say in the TV debate last night (yes, I watched it) would have gone down quite well with the US conservatives - believes action to deal with climate change is bad for business, attacked Penny Mordaunt for being liberal on trans rights. So I'm quite pleased to see her trailing - although her bringing her supporters behind Liz Truss in return for a Cabinet position is not a pleasant prospect. That said, large swathes of the Tory heartlands are due to have temperatures of up to 40C - which I'll Ieave in those terms as the area doesn't include Rees-Mogg's Somerset - with no aircon for a couple of days, which may have implications for those who continue to say climate change isn't a priority.

Apparently the way the rules now work is that at this stage there's no minimum vote required to get through to the next round: the one who comes last is knocked out and everyone else goes through. So Tugendhat will likely go out on Monday - unless the heatwave causes Badenoch to pay the price for being the one candidate who won't commit to the 2030 emissions targets. It'll be interesting to see who he then backs - he probably has the biggest gap, ideology-wise, from any of the others. Mordaunt might well court him, though, in order to prepare for Badenoch, when she goes out in the following round, backing Truss - as she's pretty much guaranteed to do.

So, my bets on who finally enters Downing Street on 5 September. If it's Sunak v. Mordaunt (all the pundits say Sunak will be one of the final two), I think Mordaunt could well do it. She's the most charismatic of all of the candidates and the true-blue right-wingers, denied the chance of voting for Truss, will be divided.

But if it's Sunak v. Truss, it's harder to call. She has a spectacularly boring delivery, but she's really modelling herself as the new Thatcher - something BoJo always tried, but always failed, to do. So the right will love her, but the others may fear that she will lose them the "red wall" seats in the North and Midlands that the Tories won in 2019. Or they may say they'll lose the red wall anyway, so they need to shore up the South. (The Tories won the red wall on 2 issues: Brexit and Corbyn. Corbyn ceased to be Labour leader 2.5 years ago and Starmer has worked hard to purge the party of anything associated with him. And Brexit, by 2024, could be as old news in the North of England as it is already in the EU.) In the South, the threat to the Tories is the Lib Dems and Sunak has a better chance of defeating them than Liz Truss.

[Lianachan]

An interesting, and to my mind very accurate, analysis by Ze Chermans.

[Richard A]

Very accurate. Not least the final point. Which brings us to a particularly uncomfortable truth. Arneb was and is right to have been appalled at Jeremy Corbyn's failure to deal properly with antisemitism in the Labour Party under his watch. And that cost Labour votes in the South - a lot of them. I heard it on the doorstep. But let's not delude ourselves. The antisemitism scandal was not what caused the Red Wall to fall. Arguably it should have been, but it wasn't. The critique of Corbyn in those seats was this: he would not get off the fence on Brexit. Ironically, here, Corbyn was very like Starmer is now. He was between a rock and hard place. The rock was his MPs in northern constituencies who told him: if you don't clearly back Brexit, we'll lose our seats to the Tories. (Which they did.) But in parts of the South (not least the Labour-held constituencies), his failure to oppose Brexit led to votes going to the Lib Dems. Starmer hasn't quite worked out a plan how to regain the South. We saw it in the last by-elections, when Labour did spectacularly badly in Devon - and portrayed as no big deal because it was getting the West Yorkshire one back that mattered. And he continues to believe that if he advocates something like EFTA, the cry will go up in all the newspapers the article mentions, "REMOAAAAAAANERRRRR!!! He's a REMOANER!!!! We told you! He'll betray what the British people voted for!" He doesn't have the guts to take that on and say, "look what Brexit has done in your constituencies!" Instead, he says, "Brexit created opportunities which the Government have failed to grasp. See? The problem isn't Brexit, it's that the Tories haven't made the best use of it. That way, he believes, he has a chance to regain the Red Wall. Quite what he'll do for the Red Wall if (probably when) he gets it back isn't clear.

I'm relieved that this German correspondent thinks it's obvious that the Starmer plan is to win the election and then begin rapprochement with the EU. To me, it's not obvious at all. Starmer is not a risk taker. He'll only follow that path if he's forced into a coalition with the Lib Dems - and will then justify it as the price of government.

Oh and Lianachan, Heid. Starmer's not opposed to indyref2 because he believes in the Union. For good or ill, Gordon Brown believes in the Union, which is why he came out and bailed Cameron out last time. Starmer's opposed to indyref2 because, again, he's afraid that he'll lose votes in England if he does anything else. Yes, he'd probably like to get seats in Scotland back, but I suspect he realises that's no going to happen. But for some reason, a lot of English believe passionately in keeping Scotland in the Union when, frankly, they couldn't give a flying fart whether the Six Counties across the water stay or go. So Starmer will not do anything to upset that apple cart.

Boze sochrani!

[tubeswell]

if it's Sunak v. Truss

I'd guess 'Truss' will probably resonate as more Trussworthy with the punters (what's in a name? 'n'all that)

[tubeswell]

if it's Sunak v. Truss

I'd guess 'Truss' will probably resonate as more Trussworthy with the punters (what's in a name? 'n'all that)

Hmmm...

[Arneb]

To answer the question implicit in the thread title: ... is Liz Truss.
I hear she started out as a librul and an EU friend but has since acknowledged that anti-EU/furriners/Krauts/Frogs/wokes/[insert favourite public enemy here] and Being Tough On [insert favourite public enemy here] works better in the core constituency, so now that is what she does.

On what the actual policy of the actual "United" Kingdom will be under her direction, the jury is, shall we say, still out.

Of course, following Lianachan's Theorem (cunt that nobody up here can stand) you could say it doesn't make a difference which particular cunt ends up at the top, but still I am mildly interested if the future PM will continue to play dice with the Good Friday Agreement, threaten a fishing war, export asylum seekers to Ruanda or not - and very interested if the pretty much unconditional support of Ukraine against the Russian invaders is going to continue.

[tubeswell]

Ok, so I was just joking about 'Tory pale iconography'*.

*Edit - I'm trying to be subtle about skin-colour bias

Now I'm caught between mild** surprise and alarm about the prospect that ^this^ could be determinative.

** only 'mild', because I shouldn't really be surprised I guess.

[Heid the Ba]

Well Truss killed Wee Betty, that would never have happened if Phil the Greek was still alive.

[Мастер]

Well Truss killed Wee Betty, that would never have happened if Phil the Greek was still alive.

I didn’t think meeting Truss would be that traumatic.

[tubeswell]

Well Truss killed Wee Betty, that would never have happened if Phil the Greek was still alive.

I didn’t think meeting Truss would be that traumatic.

Truss will have to do another U-turn to meet the new Monarch I suppose

[Мастер]

Truss will have to do another U-turn to meet the new Monarch I suppose

So she's going after him as well?

[Arneb]

She already said, God Save the King. If that isn't a threat, I don't know what is.

[Мастер]

She already said, God Save the King. If that isn't a threat, I don't know what is.

There’s always the version from BlackAdder.

God save the king - because nobody else will!

[Arneb]

Dunk, dunk, dunk, another one bites the dust....

The salad has won.

[Richard A]

Dear oh dear!

We haven't quite beaten Argentina's record of 4 Presidents in a month, but the Tories are giving it their best shot for the silver! The question is: who can they come up with enough credibility to make it to Christmas? Suella Braverman has shown her credentials clearly - she wouldn't restore relations with the EU as a whole but she would improve them with Italy and Hungary. Will the Tories swallow whatever and appoint a non-white PM? Depends on how the rules have changed - the Tory MPs were ready to, even if the shires were not.

What really, really beggars belief is what finally finished her off. A vote on fracking. What possessed her to decide to make that a confidence vote? The Bill was to allow local authorities to authorise fracking on their patch if they wanted to. Problematic, OK, and the thin end of the wedge. But a big enough to deal to pin your leadership on? Especially when your leadership is under fire.

And meanwhile, I must be the only person south of the border to have remembered the Supreme Court is still deciding on indyref 2. Maybe whoever's the next PM will say, "oh screw it, let them have another referendum - I've got other things to worry about!"

[Мастер]

We haven't quite beaten Argentina's record of 4 Presidents in a month

Methinks five presidents in two weeks!

So is she the record holder? Or do we count Lord Bath, James Waldegrave, or the Duke of Wellington?

On indyref2, if I have the story straight, the Irish got home rule, because one of their political parties was needed for the coalition? (Kind of like the way Theresa May needed the DUP.) Perhaps something similar will happen with Scotland some time.

[Мастер]

But, does she get any sort of pension?

[tubeswell]

So Liz wasn’t that Truss-worthy after all that. 6 weeks in the UK Prime Minister’s oriffice must be a record

[Lianachan]

So Liz wasn’t that Truss-worthy after all that. 6 weeks in the UK Prime Minister’s oriffice must be a record

It is. The previous holder of that record only left the job because he died of tuberculosis 119 days in.

[Lianachan]

But, does she get any sort of pension?

Oh boy, but does she!