They say a week is a long time in politics.
It certainly must have felt that way for Rishi Sunak this week. The frontrunner to be the next prime minister had had an understandably busy few days before he stood before Tory MPs in a quiet committee room off a Westminster corridor on Tuesday night. But, for a moment, he appeared to forget that he was no longer the chancellor, referring in passing to his “department”. And yet it was his decision to resign as chancellor a week before that kicked off a series of events that saw Boris Johnson ousted from power and left Mr Sunak in pole position to replace him.
To be fair to Mr Sunak, the race to become the next Conservative leader was also accompanied by temperatures rarely seen in Westminster. On Monday, a student on work experience fainted in the basement of the Churchill War Rooms museum while listening to cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi set out his pitch to become the next prime minister. Over the next few days, Mr Zahawi and a number of his rivals would also fall like flies.
With 10 entrants in the race, campaigns tried to add personality to their launches by offering cooling snacks. Sajid Javid’s saw supporters handed ice creams; Tom Tugendhat’s team tried to look modern with smoothies. Perhaps in keeping with his decision not to offer tax cuts until inflation is under control, Rishi Sunak’s launch had a small amount of tea, coffee and biscuits. Or “austerity shortbread” as they were quickly dubbed by at least one attendee.
But as the temperatures rose, so did the vitriol. As one wag quipped early in the week: “You think things in the leadership race are febrile now; wait until no one has slept for three days straight because of the heat.”
Campaigns privately admitted that they had been promised votes in subsequent rounds when MPs’ first choices fell out of the running. But the electorate with the reputation as one of the most duplicitous in the world appeared to conform to type, with the word “liar” bandied about freely.
It is in the battle for second place where the real surprise has emerged.
The foreign secretary Liz Truss has been pushed into third behind the trade minister, the much less high-profile Penny Mordaunt. She has come under fire from Ms Truss’s supporters, who have accused her of not being up to the job. Ms Mordaunt’s supporters, in turn, have accused her critics of “black ops”. Cool heads have tried to prevail. Senior figures in the Mordaunt camp have played down the idea that the race is all about momentum, which their candidate has in spades. “If it was, we would win,” one said, forlornly. “But it is actually just a long, hard slog”.
By Friday morning, Ms Mordaunt was calling for an end to mudslinging in the race. But that call, like previous ones from some of her rivals, is expected to land on deaf ears. Female Tory activists working on a number of different campaigns fear an “avalanche of sexism” before the results of the next round of voting are declared on Monday evening. By then temperatures in London are forecast to have reached a historic 41C.
