Political turmoil can be said to have taken a rain-check from leaving London since even after the election of Liz Truss as the Prime Minister and leader of Conservative Party there are still uncertainties haunting the British PM chair. It was revealed on Friday that rebels within the ruling Tory Party in the UK are allegedly plotting to unseat Truss as party leader and prime minister in favour of a so-called “unity” joint ticket team that includes Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt.
It comes at a time when a YouGov poll conducted for “The Times” revealed that nearly half of Tory party members think the party chose the incorrect leader. According to the poll, 62% of Conservative voters who participated in the last election believed that party leaders had chosen poorly when Truss and Sunak were the only candidates left on the ballot, while only 16% thought they had made the right decision.
Panicked Conservative lawmakers are now considering alternatives in the 42-year-old British Indian former Chancellor Sunak, who was the front-runner with his colleagues, and in third-place finisher Penny Mordaunt, who received the most votes within the parliamentary party.
The government is still feeling the effects of the contentious mini-budget from the end of last month, and UK Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng returned from an IMF meeting in Washington one day earlier than expected.
While more U-turns on the tax-cutting plans are anticipated as a result of crucial meetings at 10 Downing Street, the Tory backbenchers are reportedly considering the possibility of yet another leadership change.
MPs are said to beconsidering supportinga joint team of Sunak and Mordaunt where the former is the Prime Minister and the latter is his Deputy because Truss, 47, technically cannot face a leadership challenge until 12 months unless the influential 1922 Committee of backbench MPs votes to change their rules.
Given his track record in office at the Treasury and the fact that he had forewarned of much of the unrest that has since broken out under Truss, another option is for Mordaunt, 49, to assume the roles of party leader and prime minister with Sunak serving as Chancellor.
“A coronation won’t be that hard to arrange,” a senior Tory was quoted as saying in ‘The Times’.
The party thinks a deal between Sunak, who fell short of Truss in the party membership vote by a margin of 57 to 43%, and Mordaunt, who finished third in the initial round of MP voting before endorsing Truss, is possible. However, supporters of former British prime minister Boris Johnson have denounced such plotting as anti-democratic by irate Sunak supporters.
“No offence to Sunak or Mordaunt but government is not a game of spin the bottle, where if you don’t like the result you can just keep spinning again,” tweeted Tory MP Nadine Dorries, a fierce Johnson loyalist.
“Those absurdly called grandee MPs (men) agitating to remove Liz Truss are all Sunak supporters. They agitated to remove Boris Johnson and now they will continue plotting until they get their way. It’s a plot not to remove a PM but to overturn democracy,” she said.
It comes a day after James Cleverly, the foreign secretary of the UK, warned rebels that it would be a “disastrously bad idea” to consider unseating Truss as the leader of the Conservative Party, less than a month after she was chosen by the party membership.
“I think that changing the leadership would be a disastrously bad idea, not just politically but also economically, and we are absolutely going to stay focused on growing the economy,” he said.
(With inputs from PTI)
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