Well what can you say after such a crazy day when when the the Chancellor of the Exchequer of just 5-weeks was sacked and now all the focus is on Liz Truss’s survival.. One thing in her favour is that the Tory Party has no obvious mechanism for getting rid of a leader within their first year. No amount of letters going to Graham Brady is going to change this and my reading is that she will just stick there…
Things appear to be moving very fast in the Conservative Party following this morning’s sacking by Liz Truss of Chancellor Kwarteng. Inevitably all the speculation is about how long she can survive for there is little doubt that her term as prime minister has so far been an utter and total disaster for the Conservative Party. She simply doesn’t have it. My reading is that Kwarteng was simply doing in his budget what Truss wanted him to do amd it…
And for Kwasi the worst Chancellor ratings ever recorded by Ipsos Rishi Sunak, who was the long-term betting favourite for the Tory leadership last time but got beaten by Liz Truss, is now back in the favourites slot following the current turmoil in the Tory Party. Everything now depends for him on how long Truss manages to stay in post though she is helped by a party rule that there can be no challenge to the leader within their first…
And the Times reports a plot to oust her Another set of difficult front pages for Truss as the pressure mounts on her to perform another U-Turn on what has been the defining feature of her time at Number 10 – the controversial proposals in the first budget. The Times goes much further and reports that “Senior Conservatives are holding talks about replacing Liz Truss with a joint ticket of Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt as part of a “coronation”…
Inevitably given the way the opinion polls have moved so sharply to Labour then Keir starmer has moved up in the betting to be the prime minister after the next general election. Note that this is not the next prime minister market which clearly has other Conservative alternatives to to Truss as well as Starmer Whether she actually survives to fight the next election is hard to say but undoubtedly there is a lot of worry within the Conservative parliamentary…
There is a new YouGov poll in which the Tory deficit behind Labour is now at 28% which is a touch better than last week. What we do have from the firm is the latest best Prime Minister Question and as can be seen in the chart Truss trails Starmer by quite some margin. Just 13% of the sample rated Truss against 42% for Starmer. The detail of the poll finds that only 30% of those who voted Conservative at…
It was always going to be a problem for Truss that she only won the support of less than 19% of the parliamentary Conservative Party during the leadership election first round. She was the third choice of MPs Her government launched a programme in the budget which totally changed decades of the Tory approach to the economy and taxation and large parts of the parliamentary party are not happy. Essentially she has over-reached herself and now the question is how…
If the betting markets have got this right then Liz Truss is not likely to be fighting the next general election as Conservative leader and PM. The betting above shows that punters think she has just over a 10% chance of going this year with a near 59% chance of leaving in 2023 Clearly she has a lot to learn and once again today at PMQs she really struggled. She needs to prepare for this set piece even much better…