After five rounds of voting in a fortnight, an internal campaign unusual in its ferocity and suspense, it was finally Liz Truss, the current Foreign Minister, and Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who been designated by the Tory deputies, Wednesday, July 20, to enter the “final two” – the duo of finalists candidates to replace the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. It will now be up to the 160,000 to 200,000 members of the Conservative Party to decide between them. They have the whole month of August to vote: the name of the new Downing Street tenant will be revealed on September 5.
At 42, Rishi Sunak based his campaign on his competence and honesty – an obvious way to stand out from Boris Johnson, whose fall he precipitated by resigning on July 5. Above the rest for his mastery of details and his eloquence, this son of Indian immigrants from Southampton (south of England) went to a private school for boys (Winchester College) then to Oxford University , like most of the British elite. This lover of well-tailored suits made his fortune in finance – he was a hedge fund manager before embarking on a whirlwind political career: he has only been an MP for Yorkshire (north of England) since 2015.
At the beginning of the year, when the scandals multiplied around Boris Johnson, Mr. Sunak passed for the most obvious of his replacements. He had held the bar of public finances firm during the Covid-19 pandemic, made no secret of his ambition and had hardly “blundered”, except for one clumsy admission – “I am a total coke addict” (“I am completely addicted to coke”), he confided to two high school students in 2021 before quickly correcting the situation: he was not ” addict “ than Coca-Cola, of course.
Liz Truss hasn’t quit
But, if he arrived favorite of the vote of the elected Tory on Wednesday (with 137 votes out of 357), the lucky star of Rishi Sunak has faded since the spring, when the media revealed that he had a green card (a long right of residence in the United States) until 2021 and that his wife (the daughter of the extremely wealthy founder of the IT services company Infosys) did not pay taxes in the United Kingdom. In recent days, the Johnson camp faithful have repeatedly branded him a moderate – almost a curse in a party that has drifted steadily to the right since the Brexit referendum. Mr Sunak nevertheless voted to leave the European Union in 2016 and refuses to challenge Mr Johnson’s most controversial legacy: his policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda and his attempt to rewrite the northern protocol -Irish.
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