The Irish Times view on the UK Conservative party election: the issue that cannot be named

Members of the UK Conservative party will receive ballot papers for their party’s leadership election next week. They have until September 2nd to vote, but with about half of them expected to do so right away, Rishi Sunak has very little time to close the gap that has opened up between him and Liz Truss, the clear favourite to replace Boris Johnson as party leader and prime minister. A poll by YouGov late last week had Truss beating Sunak by 62 per cent to 38.

On the face of it, the Conservatives’ embrace of the foreign minister seems counter-intuitive. For a party that has swerved sharply to the right, and where attitudes to the European Union remain a defining fault line, Truss makes for an unlikely figurehead. A former Liberal Democrat, she aligned herself with the Cameron centrists and campaigned for Remain in 2016. When Britain voted to leave the EU and the Conservatives were taken over by Brexiteer true-believers, she not only changed her mind but advocated for an extremely hard exit. Despite having been in government since 2014, she has no obvious accomplishments to her name. She is a forgettable speaker and appears to hold few fixed views. Sunak, in contrast, is a fiscal conservative who was a convinced Brexiteer from early on. But his vast wealth is seen as making him remote from voters’ lives, not least in the northern “red wall” constituencies that the party must retain at the next election if it is to hold on to power, and his role in bringing down Johnson has also hurt his chances.

Having rather implausibly made herself the Brexiteers’ choice, Truss has benefited from the support of Johnson loyalists and taken on the mantle of continuity candidate. Her pledge to cut taxes, borrowing from Johnsonian cakeism, appeals to the party and helps differentiate her from Sunak, the ex-finance minister, who points out that this would worsen the country’s inflation problem and accuses Truss of telling fairy tales.

The idea that what the British government needs is continuity will appear to most people, or at least those outside Britain, as rather eccentric. The country is suffering more than most from high inflation and stuttering growth. Under Johnson, its government had lost all credibility abroad. A week after England’s record-breaking temperatures, both candidates sound half-hearted in their pledges to meet the UK’s net zero targets. And entirely missing from the debate, of course, is Brexit itself, which has made Britain poorer and more isolated. Brexit is no longer a policy but a quasi-religious badge of identification, and a glue that holds this disparate party together. To acknowledge that leaving the EU has damaged Britain and imperilled the UK, even to concede that this is legitimate ground for discussion, would be to invite voters to ask what purpose the modern Conservative party serves.