Liz Truss won the battle, but Rishi Sunak wins the war – For two long months this summer, the British public watched Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss argue bitterly over the economy while setting out their pitch to a few thousand Conservative members to pick them as Britain’s next Prime Minister.
Liz Truss won that battle. But today, Rishi Sunak won the war.
Sunak was victorious in a re-run of the leadership contest that was over before it began, seeing off Boris Johnson on Sunday and Penny Mordaunt earlier on Monday to finally enter Downing Street at the second time of asking.
Liz Truss won the battle, but Rishi Sunak wins the war
It forced Truss into the ignominious position of having to publicly congratulate her former rival on succeeding her, just seven weeks after he accurately warned her plans would trash Britain’s economy.
And it marks a historic day for the country; Sunak is the first person of color, the first Hindu, and the youngest politician in two centuries to get the keys to Number 10.
But as the Conservative Party lays on a fanfare for its third leader since the leaves started falling from Westminster’s trees, it knows that Sunak represents a last chance to claw back some credibility with the British public.
Boris Johnson’s fall from grace — followed swiftly by Liz Truss’s 45-day nosedive into the footnotes of history — has left one of the world’s most successful political parties on the brink of rupturing.
Uniting the Conservative Party is Sunak’s first task if he wishes to avoid becoming another casualty of the unending Conservative psychodrama, and given the ill feeling towards him from many of Johnson’s allies, it may take some doing.
A harder challenge still for the ultra-rich former banker will be to stabilize Britain’s economy, and soothe the fears of families across the nation struggling through a cost of living crisis.
And he will be forced to bat away calls from day one for a general election, which have grown louder with each new Prime Minister.
Sunak’s rise to Number 10 has been meteoric. He will hope his stay there can be a lengthy one, but he has some difficult headwinds to weather first.
