After a grueling nationwide tour, a dozen hustles and three televised debates, Liz Truss appears poised to take over as Britain’s next prime minister before Conservative Party members finish voting on Friday.
The outcome of the Foreign Secretary’s summer-long campaign against former Chancellor Rishi Sunak will be announced on Monday, before Prime Minister Boris Johnson formally tenders his resignation to Queen Elizabeth II the next day.
Postal and online voting by the estimated 200,000 Tory members began in early August, a month after Johnson announced his resignation, and will end at 5 p.m. (1600 GMT).
Truss enjoys overwhelming support for Sunak in member polls.
But the winner faces an evanescent political honeymoon once he returns to 10 Downing Street from a meeting with the Queen in the Scottish Highlands.
The UK is in the midst of its worst cost-of-living crisis in generations, with inflation soaring in double digits while energy prices soar in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Millions say they will face a painful choice between eating and heating this winter, with bills soaring by 80 percent from October — and further into January — according to surveys.
Truss has promised tax cuts, but these would not benefit the poorest.
For weeks the Tory front runner has ruled out direct handouts, and at Wednesday’s latest husting he went further by repeating former US President George Bush’s promise not to pay taxes anymore – which he soon broke.
But in Thursday’s edition of The Sun newspaper, Truss vowed to provide “immediate support to ensure people are not faced with unaffordable fuel bills” this winter.
“I firmly believe that we need to be radical in these difficult times,” she added, previewing her reform agenda from Thatcher to cement Johnson’s Brexit legacy.
– Challenge –
Tory MPs turned against their Brexit hero Johnson after months of scandal, favoring Sunak over Truss as the more eligible leader to lead them until the next general election in January 2025.
But the party’s grassroots have aligned with Truss’ right-wing platform, even though she is a former Liberal Democrat who opposed leaving the European Union in Britain’s 2016 referendum.
“She’s a better politician,” John Curtice, a politics professor at the University of Strathclyde, told AFP after Truss stuck to a simple script during the long, hot summer of campaigning.
“Sunak has shown some of the qualities one would hope for in a good minister. But Miss Truss has shown the qualities you need in a politician,” added Curtice.
But whoever wins, recent polls of broader voters show the Conservatives face a growing challenge to sustain their 12-year grip on power.
Labor has benefited from the attack on Johnson’s ‘zombie government’ as the Conservatives have taken time to elect a new leader who has been gripped by power struggles despite the wider crisis.
The main opposition party now has a double-digit lead over the Tories in opinion polls as the economic landscape is at its worst since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979.
