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Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Pocket Parks from their Pocket Symphonies.
This week we look, in our politics section, at the Tory Leadership contest. Why has it been whittled down to Sunak and Truss (or Rish! and Radon Liz as the great John Crace refers to them) and what will their pitches ultimately be.
And of course, there’s crumpled rosette at the end of our pin-striped parade that is Charlie’s Attic – this week featuring a podcast on the most agonising place for a tattoo.
Sunak and Truss
Unless you’ve been under a rock, the Tory Leadership contest won’t have passed you by. The race has happened at breakneck speed, with countless runners and riders already down to two: Sunak and Truss.
In many respects it has been a primer on the value of name recognition. With the public unfamiliar with most candidates, the last fortnight has seen excitement over Badenoch, Tugendhat and the somewhat better-known Mordaunt take hold at various points among the commentariat – not to mention a sudden awareness, among 12% of the public, of the fictional Tory MP Stuart Lewis. Yet it has ultimately been whittled down to two of the best-known candidates.
The pattern has been a bit like a World Cup, where one or two of the smaller nations generate excitement in the group stages, but before you know it it’s ended up as the Germany-Italy final everyone was predicting in the first place.
So what of the final two contenders? The political scientist Matthew Goodwin wrote a long piece a few days ago, arguing that Sunak is the wrong candidate. Goodwin suggests that: “Rishi Sunak looks like the wrong kind of conservative for today’s politics, a throwback to the 2010s Cameroon conservatism rather than a serious and intellectually interesting response to the demands of post-Brexit conservatism.”
It is difficult to see exactly what marks Sunak out this way, when you look at his policies and those of other candidates (as an exceptionally handy public spreadsheet which has been doing the rounds allows you to do). He has ruled out immediate tax cuts, for example, in a way that Truss has not – a step which surely aligns with Red Wall priorities. And his Brexit credentials are pretty strong.
Yet the contest looks like it may ultimately shake down – or be shaken down by the way that commentators interpret it – to a choice between two pitches: the fiscal conservatism of Sunak and the cultural conservatism of Truss. If this happens it will be interesting to see which way the Conservative membership goes.
And finally this week, the psycho-social blue rinse brigade that is Charlie’s Attic:
Watch the story behind one of the world’s most famous photos.
