How the stopwatch had begun on Truss’ time in Downing Street

This is an audio transcript of the Payne’s Politics podcast episode: ‘How the stopwatch had begun on Truss’ time in Downing Street’

Sebastian Payne
Liz Truss’ catastrophic 44 days as prime minister came to a sharp end this week as the Conservative party embarked on yet another leadership race.

Liz Truss
We delivered on energy bills and on cutting national insurance, and we set out a vision for a low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit. I recognise though, that given this situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative party. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative party.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Sebastian Payne
Welcome to Payne’s Politics, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, Sebastian Payne. In this episode, we’ll be looking back on what can only be described as a completely bonkers week in Westminster. How Liz Truss became the shortest among the most worst prime ministers in British history, the very sticky end of her premiership. And crucially, what happens next, including that question that is on everybody’s list: will Boris Johnson make the mother of all comebacks? Our political editor George Packer and associate editor Camilla Cavendish will be unpacking it all with special guest Paul Goodman, editor of the ConservativeHome website. Thank you all for joining.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Sebastian Payne
Ever since the disastrous “mini” Budget was wholly rejected by markets, the stopwatch had begun on Liz Truss’ time in Downing Street. The view of her closest allies and ministers was that she had at best weeks or months left of her premiership. But events saw otherwise. Her new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, was forced to bin the rest of her “mini” Budget and with it, the last of her credibility. Very fractious scenes in the House of Commons on Wednesday brought things to a swift conclusion on Thursday. But why? Sir Charles Walker, a veteran Conservative MP, summed up the mood on why Tory decided they were fed up of Liz Truss.

Charles Walker
This is an absolute disgrace. As a Tory MP of 17 years, who’s never been a minister, who’s got on with it loyally most of the time, I think it’s a shambles and a disgrace. I think it is utterly appalling. I really shouldn’t say this, but I hope all those people that put Liz Truss in No 10, I hope it was worth it. I think it was worth it for the ministerial red box. I hope it was worth it to sit round the cabinet table because the damage they had done to our party is extraordinary.

Sebastian Payne
Well, George Parker, where to begin? What a week it’s been. I think when we started recording the podcast last Friday afternoon, we couldn’t have seen this happening. But let’s . . . We’re gonna run through the week bit by bit, and all the action and things really start to come off the tracks on Monday morning when we were prepared for more market uncertainty. And Jeremy Hunt announced that he was going to bin the rest of that disastrous “mini” Budget, which will surely go down as the worst fiscal event ever.

George Parker
Well, it doesn’t leave any doubt about that. It was a total catastrophe, and you could see it coming pretty soon. I could, of course, warned about it. What would happen over the summer? Yes. In the end, it ended up with Jeremy Hunt reversing £32bn out of the £45bn of unfunded tax cuts. But that was really just a bit of it. I mean, the point was the whole government economic strategy had been blown out of the water. And you heard there in that clip at the top, Liz Truss saying she wasn’t able to deliver this low-tax, high-growth vision she promised and the freedoms of Brexit. So I don’t think it was just the unravelling of that particular “mini” Budget, but it was the unravelling of a whole post-Brexit dream, wasn’t it? That dream of basically being able to pursue a very low-tax, very low-regulation economy to create a vibrant, high-growth economy. That dream died when Liz Truss stepped out of the street on to that podium in Downing Street on Thursday.

Sebastian Payne
Well, let’s hear what Jeremy Hunt had to say on Monday morning when he killed off that dream.

Jeremy Hunt
We will reverse almost all the tax measures announced in the growth plan three weeks ago that have not started parliamentary legislation. So whilst we will continue with the abolition of the health and social care levy and stamp duty changes, we will no longer be proceeding with the cuts to dividend tax rates, the reversal of off-payroll working reforms introduced in 2017 and 2021. The new VAT-free shopping scheme for non-UK visitors or the freeze on alcohol duty rates. But beyond that, the prime minister and I have agreed it would not be irresponsible to continue exposing public finances to unlimited volatility in international gas prices. So I am announcing today a Treasury-led review into how we support energy bills beyond April next year. The objective is to design a new approach that will cost the taxpayer significantly less than planned whilst ensuring enough support for those in need.

Sebastian Payne
Well, Camilla Cavendish, thanks for joining us again on the pod. When we had you on last week, you were praising Jeremy Hunt and said you thought he was a good, solid choice to replace Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor. Was there ever any doubt he was going to essentially bin everything Liz Truss had stood on her leadership platform for?

Camilla Cavendish
I guess in retrospect, you know, it seems, you know, now we think of course that you’re completely right, it was extremely difficult to do. And the truth is that he has, as Michael Gove put it this week, essentially been running the country in partnership with the bond markets, with the prime minister Liz Truss sort of sitting to one side. It must have been very hard for him to do, but he as you said, you know, he’s done the right things to steady the ship, at least in the short term. Particularly reducing the energy price package 26 months, because it was that open-ended guarantee of two years to all taxpayers, making us all dependent on the wholesale price of gas. That was the biggest blank cheque in the whole package.

Sebastian Payne
Well, Paul Goodman, and again, thanks for coming back on the podcast. You could see how weak Liz Truss looked on Monday afternoon when Penny Mordaunt had to do an urgent question in the House of Commons and actually said this about the prime minister.

Penny Mordaunt
(MPs speaking simultaneously: “Yeah!”) Well, the prime minister is not under a desk, is she?  (MPs laughing and cheering) She . . . I can assure, I can assure the House . . . I can assure the House . . . I can assure the House that she is . . . which with regret, she is not here for a very good reason.

Sebastian Payne
Paul, when you hear that, that is really the palable sense of power draining from the prime minister — MPs openly laughing at Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House, because Liz Truss just didn’t turn up to the dispatch box to defend herself.

Paul Goodman
Because there’s a question about what Penny Mordaunt was doing there and the extent to which she was pushing Liz Truss down, as it were, to pull herself up. I think you also stand back from that scene in the Commons and just look at the structural situation Liz Truss was in. She was elected without the support of the centre left of her party, with the support of the centre right of her party. And very simply, once Kwarteng had gone, once she reneged on the bulk of the provisions in the “mini” Budget, once she brought in Jeremy Hunt and still later, once she brought in Grant Shapps, she’d lost the support of the centre right as well. So she had nowhere to go and her departure was simply a matter of time.

Sebastian Payne
And the other thing as well, of course, was this confusion about what was gonna happen with spending, George, because Jeremy Hunt said on Monday that there may have to be tax rises. Literally the opposite of what Liz Truss stood on, but also potential cuts to spending as well and as we’ll come on to in a moment. The pension triple lock was one of the things that was up in the air and the mood we picked up from Conservative MPs was: What is going on? We didn’t vote for any of this. And crucially, Liz Truss has no credibility left to deliver any of it.

George Parker
The package, which is still scheduled to be delivered on October the 31st, is gonna be, well, Jeremy Hunt himself said it’s going to be eye-wateringly difficult. It will stand on its head all of the stuff that Liz Truss was talking about during the Tory leadership. They’re looking to fill a fiscal hole of about £40bn. The speculation is that roughly half of that would be done on tax rises, roughly half on spending cuts. And that’s a huge amount of difficult stuff coming down the track. And as you mentioned, the pensions triple lock, I mean, that was one thing that the Treasury would have liked to have got stuck into, but it had become a kind of totemic issue. I think they accept in the Treasury now that given how totemic it’s been in multiple Conservative manifestos and crucial to shoring up the grey vote, that’s probably got to stay. But I think almost everything else is on the table.

Sebastian Payne
Now, Tuesday things calmed down a little bit, but obviously Liz Truss was nowhere really to be seen. But Paul, we know on Tuesday night there was a crucial meeting between the now former Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Liz Truss. And it’s not wholly clear what happened in that, but it sounds as if they had a real dispute over policy, particularly immigration, with Ms Braverman being very keen to keep numbers low. And she’s actively advocated going back to the famous tens of thousands pledge made by David Cameron and Liz Truss wanting to liberalise it. Do you think it was inevitable? Liz Truss and Suella Braverman were always going to fall out?

Paul Goodman
Yes, because Suella Braverman is an immensely ambitious politician who’s just rung in the leadership election, very clearly, had her eye on the top job and is looking at it as a time when the prime minister is exceptionally weak. So I think this was clearly going to happen. There’s just this ideological element too, because Suella Braverman had to depart the scene because she basically sent a government information to a backbencher and others on a private email. This is really a somewhat flimsy reason for her departure, and behind it was a big battle of different ideas about immigration policy on the one hand. So Braverman was really standing for the traditional view and the view, I think, of the 2019 manifesto, which was immigration must be restricted. And on the other hand, Liz Truss is really much closer to the illiberal ideas of the Institute of Economic Affairs and these other free market think-tanks that she’s grown up being very chummy with, which is that you go for growth and after all, growth was the centrepiece of the Truss election campaign, at which point she really found that these two elements didn’t really run alongside each other, which is just restrictive policy and the more liberal growth policy. So something was always going to give, and in this case, it was Suella Braverman.

Sebastian Payne
Now, on Wednesday morning, Camilla, before we get to PMQs, there was news from Downing Street that one of Liz Truss’ close aides, Jason Stein, who has worked for the prime minister for many years, was being suspended. And this came off the back of some very negative briefings about several cabinet ministers, including Michael Gove, former levelling up secretary, and Sajid Javid, the former chancellor, where he’d been described as “shit”, and Michael Gove would be described as a “sadist”. And apparently it was a meeting between Mr Javid and Liz Truss and he said, look, if you don’t deal with this guy, I’m gonna ask the question at PMQs. This is not normal, really, to have an aide going around acting like this, but it was, and also for former cabinet ministers to make it a defining issue.

Camilla Cavendish
Look, I think a lot of people are going to No 10. I like to think that they’re in an episode of The West Wing or in our country in the thick of it. They think that the whole game is about manoeuvring. I mean, the Truss government has been one of the most vindictive, badly run, narrow-minded governments that I have seen in watching politics for many years. And she made a fatal mistake at the beginning by only appointing to her cabinet people who had slavishly supported her, which meant that she basically left out most of the talented people. But I have to say to then go the next step of briefing in such horrific terms against two of the most talented people in the Conservative party, kind of beggar belief. And I’m pretty sure that Jason Stein wasn’t making that up just on his own.

Sebastian Payne
And Paul, you’ve written quite a lot about this, the fact that one of the fundamental flaws in the Truss government was that both in the cabinet but also her Downing Street team, they were all total lawyers. There was not much diversity of thought, there was not much experience, and not with people who had experience of governing. And that includes Mr Stein.

Paul Goodman
Some people will say that the moment the Truss government went wrong was the “mini” Budget. I think the moment you could clearly see it going wrong was when she formed her cabinet, because the situation really is as follows: that you can appoint a band of your own followers if you’ve just been elected on your own mandate, really a source of your party’s term in power, as it were. I mean Liz Truss was elected in a fourth term after the Conservatives just got rid, I think, of their third leader in about seven years as an aside and she had only 32 per cent support from her own MPs, the lowest total ever, I think, for any winning, winning candidate. And fundamentally, she was in a fragile position. And politically, the . . . The smart thing to do here would be to present yourself as a national leader dealing with a national crisis. You could have dealt with the energy package in that sort of way, made a big thing of summoning opposition leaders in for talks and sort of projecting yourself as a national healer instead of this atrocious urges to go to war, not so much with the Labour party — with her own party, and with the two-thirds of it that had voted for her. It was really nothing short of clinically insane.

Sebastian Payne
And when you think about that, George, it seems so obvious. Why would you? And also we should remember in the leadership contest in September, Liz Truss got 57 per cent, not as high as the polls suggested, and certainly not as high as her team suggested. And again, this sense that she came in with this very pugilistic style of governing but didn’t have the mandate or support to back it up.

George Parker
No, she came in as if she had absolute control and absolute power. We seem to discover that was the opposite, was the case. It was an extraordinary way to behave. I mean, even Tony Blair, especially Tony Blair when he came with that massive majority, never behaved in that way towards his potential enemies. But to do it when you’re already in such a weak position, it was almost as if she’d gone through a manual of how to destroy your own premiership. Not just in the way she went to war with her own political opponents, but the way that she just took policy ideas that were doomed to failure, were bound to wind up the electorate and just proceeded anyway and said, “Well, I’m not concerned about optics”. And there was kind of an arrogance around that group of people that they were right and everyone else was wrong. This had been pickled into a dogma, to paraphrase Neil Kinnock, over many years, formed in the, the think-tanks in Tufton Street and, and then put into practice and it all fell apart in its first contact with reality, didn’t it?

Sebastian Payne
It really felt as if it fell apart at PMQs, which was pretty much a humiliating moment for the prime minister.

Liz Truss
I am a fighter, and not a quitter. (MPs cheering)

Keir Starmer
A book is being written about the prime minister’s time in office. (Laughter) Apparently it’s going to be out by Christmas. (Laughter) Is that the release date or the title? (Laughter)

Sebastian Payne
And again, Paul, it’s that laughter when, you know, Liz Truss was totally unable to summon up much support from the Tory benches and it very much reminded me of Boris Johnson’s final days in Downing Street when we were watching that PMQs and you could just feel Tory MPs were behind her. And by that point it was a question of when, not if. And it didn’t feel as if Downing Street had any plans for getting out of this. They were just trying to survive hour by hour at this rate, which we saw. And this announcement seemed to come out of nowhere that the pension triple lock would be kept after all.

Paul Goodman
It was a situation of complete confusion, and I was busy watching Truss really losing support on  the right of her party, as well as on the left over immigration, as we discussed. But she also gave a very equivocal answer to David Jones, the backbench stalwart of the ERG, over the Northern Ireland Protocol, which contrasted really with a much firmer response she has meant to have given the ERG in private the previous day. So you could tell at that point that the whole thing was falling apart. So I suppose the question that arose as a result, I mean, looking at the spectacle in the Commons, it wasn’t just whether the Conservative party could be led by Liz Truss, but whether in its present state it’s capable of being led by anyone.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Sebastian Payne
That night, George, we had two crucial things: Suella Braverman formally resigned and did a very cutting resignation letter that talked about this security breach, which was a written ministerial statement that was on her personal phone. And a senior Whitehall official to me said that that was complete rubbish because the WMS would have been public anyway. It wasn’t exactly top state secrets. And they also said to me, if I’m being honest, the prime minister could easily hush that up if they wanted to. It seemed to be much more about those policy differences about immigration. But essentially, Suella Braverman in all but name, said Liz Truss, you’ve got to go but you’re not taking responsibility. The party has gone in the wrong direction and your time has come to an end.

George Parker
Yes, I mean, I think it was strong view held on the right of the party and certainly by Suella Braverman’s friends, that she’d been fitted up by the prime minister and there’d been this blazing row about immigration. The immigration leaver was one thing that the Treasury was very keen to pull to get growth going. It’s one of the easiest things to actually on the supply side to get growth going. And Liz Truss had gone along with it, but of course that created a huge amount of tension with Suella Braverman, and she went out in a blaze of glory. The resignation letter was absolutely cutting. She said, “I’ve made a mistake, I’ve taken responsibility, I resign”. Clear implication to Liz Truss: Why don’t you do the same thing? That was a disastrous moment. But decided, of course, to the sense of chaos that were probably about to come on to in the House of Commons, obviously a few hours later.

Sebastian Payne
So Camilla, that night, for inexplicable reasons the Truss government, continuing with its death wish, decided to have a vote on fracking, which is probably one of the most contentious policy issues within the Conservative party. And it’s split right down this difficult line in the party between those who are the Yimbees, who want to build, who want to get fracking, who want to go for that growth agenda, and more traditional Conservatives who care about the physical environment and would prefer to have renewables or nuclear power, what have you. Why on earth did they decide to press a vote on this?

Camilla Cavendish
Well, I’d love to know the answer to that question, Seb, because I think one of the other aspects of this is that every part of the management of government and party has been a failure in the last three months. And in fact, I think the chief whip and the deputy chief whip resigned that night to add to the shambles. And there were conflicting reports, rumours going around MPs as to whether this was supposed to be a vote of no confidence in the government or not. There was a three-line whip, with four . . . I think 40 Tory MPs divided, which pretty much did demonstrate that she had lost all authority. To go back to the wonderful clip we played of Sir Charles Walker, who I really do admire. I mean, he really spoke for the country that night when he said, you know, I’ve been there for 17 years. I’ve never been a minister. I’ve been keeping my head down and I am sick of this. And it was just the utter shambles and lack of decisiveness that I think has really finally spelt the end of her premiership.

Sebastian Payne
Of course, George, this was actually a Labour motion that was put forward on fracking, but the fatal mistake was to make it a confidence issue in the government. Because obviously the fixed-term parliament that no longer exists — if you make them the confidence issue and you lose it, that therefore means it’s the end of the government and the reports of some of the scenes seem to be totally chaotic. That Chris Bryant, the senior Labour MP, tweeted a picture of a stand-off in the voting lobbies. And of course, possibly one of the quotes the week came from Craig Whittaker, the deputy chief whip, who came out of the voting lobby and said, “I am fucking furious and I don’t give a fuck anymore”.

George Parker
(Laughs) Yeah, it was a . . . It was a . . . It was a . . . It was a night of total chaos. There was one account I heard. I saw it down to the Strangers’ Bar straight afterwards just to catch up some of the gossip. There was the claims that Wendy Morton, the chief whip, had resigned in the division lobbies and that Liz Truss had been seen dashing out after her to try and persuade her to change her mind, which I think ultimately she did. Look, I can see why the government decided it wants to make a confidence vote in question because it wasn’t just about fracking, it was basically about the Labour party trying to get hold of the Commons order paper and be able to tell the government what to do in terms of legislation. But you just can’t do it if you’re in a situation that’s as bleak and weak as Liz Truss found herself in. I doubt that you can even dream of going down the route of turn things into votes of confidence. And then what do you do? Even if there had been a, if they’d actually imposed this, they’d have ended up with 15 or 20 or so fewer Tory MPs on the, on the, on the government list. So, you know, the whole thing was doomed to failure.

Sebastian Payne
Well, Paul, you spent nine years as a Conservative MP. This is not normal behaviour, just to clarify. And there was talk that people being manhandled, of being physically taken into voting lobbies. And then still confused about whether this was a confidence issue. The claims to the Energy Minister when the ballot box said that it wasn’t a confidence issue. And then at 1.33am on Thursday morning, lobby journalists got a message out from Downing Street saying it was a confidence issue and MPs would be reprimanded in some way that never came to pass.

Paul Goodman
There are two different issues here, and the first is the manhandling and so on and so forth. I’m a bit cool about that. I never saw any when I was there in ten years. Then again, I was an opposition MP and the temperature in the opposition lobby is just usually a bit cooler. But I think those of us who’ve been around for a bit will remember tales of some pretty lively whipping in the Blair years and indeed back in the Major years with a particularly well-known heavy in the whip’s office called David Lightbown. So I don’t think any of that is a call exceptional. I think what has changed is that there is a culture now abroad because it quite rightly finds the prospect of violence and threats and people being carried off and taken from one place to another to be completely wrong. And I think that’s a step in the right direction towards making a start, something new. I think what is new is the astonishing level of incompetence of the government in combination with the whips, because we’ve heard of the things going wrong in the Commons before, but not really on this scale as far as I can remember. Not a vote of confidence, really. So first it’s on, then it’s off, then it’s on is what I’d call unkindly the Wendy Morton hokey-cokey. You didn’t know whether she’d resign or not, whether she’d stay or not. And it’s a token of what some Camilla was talking about earlier, which you see the sheer wretchedness of this Downing Street operation. I mean, the worst, the most adolescent and contemptible I’ve ever seen.

Sebastian Payne
Well, Thursday morning, George, was when that operation came crashing down. And we know that Sir Graham Brady, who’s chair of the 1922 committee, went to visit Liz Truss, as he did with Boris Johnson, as he did with Theresa May, and essentially said, look, you’ve got to go. And if you don’t go the smooth way, we’ll change the rules, have a vote, you’ll lose the vote. And Liz Truss had pretty much given up by that point based on what we’ve been, what we’ve been reporting.

George Parker
People tell us that on Wednesday evening, after the Suella Braverman debacle and the chaotic scenes we’ve just been discussing in the division lobbies, Liz Truss still seemed to think somehow there was a way through and she could hang on. But I’m told that by Thursday morning she slept on it and realised the end was nigh. Then we had the figure of Graham Brady coming in through the backdoor of Downing Street, which is never a good sign in situations like this. And as you say, he delivered the coup de grâce alongside Thérèse Coffey, the deputy prime minister, and also Jake Berry, the chair of the Conservative party. And people say that by the time it came to that, that Liz Truss said was resigned to her fate and it was almost like a weight was lifting off her shoulders. Just one little bit of colour, which I don’t think we’ve reported yet, but it’s intriguing is that after this meeting where Graham Brady basically told her that time in No 10 was over, he said, I don’t want to go out the backdoor yet because the press are waiting for me. So he went up into the Downing Street study, had a cup of tea and watched the events developing on telly as Liz Truss prepared to go out into the street to announce her resignation. Just so, the executioner was upstairs while the executionee was downstairs proposing to, preparing to resign. So extraordinary scenes.

Sebastian Payne
I’m sure he sat back and thought, well, that’s a nice job. Well done there. Camilla, what did you make of her resignation speech? I mean, the first of all, it was just sort of totally farcical that we were here again. It felt just like yesterday, it was Boris Johnson standing outside No 10 with his podium announcing the Conservative party had lost faith in him. And in her speech, she really just sort of didn’t do that much regret. She talked about the energy price guarantee. She expressed regret she could have done her economic reform, but it seemed almost sort of totally oblivious to reality.

Camilla Cavendish
Yeah. I mean, some people have been joking that Downing Street should just retain the lectern outside the front door because they seem to need it so often. Look, I think, to be honest, I mean, to be fair to her, it was pretty difficult. It was mercifully short speech. As you say, she didn’t really exhibit very much regret. However, she avoided doing what Boris Johnson did in his speech, which was a kind of “God, you’ll miss me when I’m gone”. I mean, that was, that was, I think, even worse. (Laughs) And yes, she was on repeat, I suspect, having seen her face on Monday when Jeremy Hunt was defenestrating her entire package, I think she probably got into a state of shellshock, to be quite honest, and that was about all she could do.

Sebastian Payne
So we are now looking forward to another Conservative party leadership contest. But unlike the last one, this one’s going to be a bit shorter. Let’s hear Sir Graham Brady explain.

Graham Brady
I have spoken to the party chairman, Jake Berry, and he has confirmed that it will be possible to conduct a ballot and conclude a leadership election by Friday, the 28th of October. So we should have a new leader in place before the fiscal statement, which will take place on the 31st.

Sebastian Payne
So Paul, again, I dread to think how many Conservative leadership contests you have experienced, watched and given opinions on. But this one is at breakneck speed. We’ve never had anything this quick before, and the crucial thing is that high level to get on the ballot. In the last contest it was 20 MPs, now it’s a hundred MPs and it’s clearly Sir Graham Brady trying to whittle it down very quickly and potentially help some candidates and hinder others.

Paul Goodman
This is an unfashionable thing to say, but I think the 22 executives have handled this quite well because the Constitution obliges them. If there are two candidates, the Constitution of the Conservative party, to go to the members, and there’s no way around that without amending the Constitution, which is a very time-consuming, laborious and uncertain business. So what they’ve done very sensibly is they’ve set the threshold of such a way as to eliminate all the jokers, of whom there are always some. And basically, to ensure the threshold of 100 that you really can’t have more than three candidates sort of getting through. So I think that the rules have been set, so they’re pretty fair and square. Now, the question everyone is naturally asking is: does Boris Johnson want to return to Downing Street in the first place and can he get a hundred nominations, which Rishi Sunak, assuming he wants to start, probably can? Yesterday evening I thought it would be difficult for Boris Johnson to get to the hundred, but some of my best, wisest and most well-informed friends think that he can. I really wouldn’t like to put any money on it. And I do think if he gets a hundred and if he gets into the ballot, I doubt at the moment whether there would be more than few people in it, namely himself and Rishi Sunak. And this is a pretty nightmare prospect for the Conservative party (Laughs). Boris Johnson in a final ballot in front of the members, having resigned, up against the man who resigned rather than stay in his government, Rishi Sunak. It really couldn’t be worse.

Sebastian Payne
Well, George, that very much is the battle royale scenario, the season finale of this drama we’ve been living through for the past 12 years, if that does happen. So just on the contest, so as we said, we’re recording this on Friday afternoon. Nobody has formally declared their intention to stand, but there’s full people very much in the ether, as Paul said, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and also Penny Mordaunt as well. And it’s very uncertain what’s going to happen. But just on the Boris Johnson point. Let’s hear from Christopher Chope, who is a right-leaning Tory, giving the case of why he wants to see the former prime minister make a miraculous comeback.

Christopher Chope
I don’t see that there’s really any of the candidates who are coming forward are going to come out in my support. And I think that the news that Boris Johnson might be riding to the rescue of the country and the Conservative party is really a great tonic. And I’m really excited about that prospect because I didn’t want him to be deposed in the first place. I said we’d rue the day that he was deposed.

Sebastian Payne
When you hear that, George, like there are a lot of Boris loyalists in the Conservative parliamentary party who agree. But the crucial question is, can he get to a hundred? Because my feeling is, based on the conversations on Friday, if he knows he can get to a hundred, he will run and he will probably win. But that is the crucial thing.

George Parker
That is crucial. And I thought Paul summed up very well, my initial thoughts were the same as Paul’s that I thought it was very difficult to imagine him getting to a hundred. But as the hours have drifted past him, the, there’s a bit of a momentum building up behind him. People are coming up behind Boris Johnson. So I think it’s entirely conceivable. But he, as you say, he won’t stand unless he’s certain he can get to that a hundred vote threshold. Then we are into a really difficult situation, as Paul just described, not just because you’ve got two armed camps facing each other. The Boris camp really hate Rishi Sunak. They think he’s a traitor. And the Rishi camp who think Boris Johnson is totally unsuitable to office. I mean, that is — the party, if it’s to stay in office, needs to unite. This would be the worst possible scenario. Then the danger of this going into the party membership would probably, in that situation would probably back Boris Johnson, although it’s not certain. Then you’ve got a scenario where Boris Johnson becomes prime minister with a House of Commons Privileges Committee inquiry about whether he lied to Parliament, still hanging over him and with the possibility, as I was speaking to one Tory former cabinet minister earlier on today who said: we could be back here again in three months’ time, you know, he could be suspended from the House of Commons, he could be subject to a by-election, he could be out of the House of Commons. And then three months’ time we’re doing this again. I mean, it’s just an amazing and frankly ludicrous scenario.

Sebastian Payne
Camilla, obviously, when the Tory party chose Boris Johnson in the summer of 2019, it was a risk and a gamble. But as George just outlined, it would be another level and risk and a gamble for them to do that again. Because as someone who’s just written a book on the first fall of Boris Johnson, I should add the first and now, you know, his Downing Street operation never functioned very well in the three years he was there. He went through scores of aides. He definitely struggled to make the job work for him. And it does seem somewhat odd. The Conservative MPs are looking at this situation and think actually this is the man to get us out of this mess.

Camilla Cavendish
Yeah, my hunch is that Boris Johnson right now is loving the attention, loving the speculation, and he may not actually run because I tend to think that he probably won’t make the 100 threshold. He’ll get a lot of donor money, but he may not make the 100 threshold because so many MPs are so angry that he has put them in this position. And there are certain number who certainly said to me they will actually resign and trigger by-elections if he were to become prime minister. So I think it’s possible that he may not actually stand at all. However, as you’ve said, if he does, he’s likely to be anointed by the party members. And this kind of bring us to the next issue: I simply cannot understand why the 1922 committee is allowing this to go back to the party members again. What this means is there’s a system which was established to elect a leader from Conservative party, but not a prime minister is being allowed for a handful of people in this country to select the prime minister who’s supposed to govern for the nation. This is not a recipe for success. Labour had the same problem which led them to Jeremy Corbyn. I simply cannot believe that the 1922 committee has not taken this opportunity to change those rules and ensure this contest is only held between the MPs who, let’s face it, actually know the strengths and weaknesses of these candidates.

Sebastian Payne
I think is, Paul, you outline that is quite tricky thing to do with the Conservative party contest, but is that, let’s throw it forward to the other three or four counts in the mix as well. So Rishi Sunak, if Boris Johnson doesn’t run, Rishi Sunak feels like the hot favourite to win, the natural person who will do this. But then Penny Mordaunt might be able to come down the middle and become a compromise. If you’ve got that sort of battle royale scenario George was talking about between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt might be the candidate MPs coalesce around just to try and stop this psychodrama.

Paul Goodman
Thinking about what’s allowed, what we’re dealing with is at present is nominations. It’s not actual votes. So let’s just suppose for a moment. Boris Johnson says he’s not going to stand. Let’s go with that bit of a conversation that we’ve been plotting. Immediately, the 60 or so declarations of support that he’s got, are available to go to someone else. So watching the timescale of all this will be very interesting if Boris Johnson presses ahead. I would say at the moment that he and Rishi Sunak are like, more likely to make the ballot than anyone else, given the balance of numbers. If Boris Johnson pulls out, or Rishi Sunak astonishes us by saying that he’s not going to stand, then all these nominations, all these MPs who declare for someone or another — well, they’re up for grabs and new entrants will come into the lists. So I’m deliberately painting a rather murky picture about what happens. But the key, as it were to the murkiness, is Boris Johnson’s intentions. If he decides he’s gonna stand, it’s a race to see whether he gets a hundred nominations or not. And if he doesn’t, I think the whole thing could be thrown wide open.

Sebastian Payne
And George, finally, where would you put your money on at this point? I’m sorry, the question you don’t want to be asked after this very long week between those candidates. We’ve obviously mentioned Penny Mordaunt, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak. And we should also, of course, mention Kemi Badenoch and the international trade secretary who is mulling over bids, which again could further split the right vote. And because of that high threshold, Sir Graham Brady has made, it could split the right vote, which again would help Mr Sunak.

George Parker
Well, having been tempted by your previous invitations to make predictions, Seb, I’ve predicted that Boris Johnson was going to lead the Conservatives into the next election. Maybe I should go with Boris Johnson to help to redeem some of my earlier predictions. I still think that at the end of the day, the party will look into the abyss and they will put competence over ideology and they’ll go for Rishi Sunak. I know he’s a divisive figure in the party, but just as we’re speaking today, the markets are starting to show some volatility again because of the uncertainty about the future leadership of the party. I think that could play a factor in the votes on Monday, actually. And I think in the end, the party will just stare into the abyss and think we’ve got to step back and Sunak’s the person who’s best placed to pull them back from the brink.

Sebastian Payne
And, Camilla, give us your predictions for the next week ahead.

Camilla Cavendish
I agree with George that Rishi Sunak is by far the best placed person to bring the markets back from the brink. I’m not sure, unfortunately, that they will go for him and I think it is quite possible that we’ll end up with Penny Mordaunt on the basis that in fact the Boris Johnson factor throws everything else up into the air.

Sebastian Payne
And finally, Paul?

Paul Goodman
I think if Boris Johnson gets on the ballot in front of some members, he is the favourites to do it. If so, I’d have to say I think the Conservative party will be engaged in a kind of dance of death as the consequences become apparent. But that is my fear as the weekend looms before us. I think at the moment Penny Mordaunt is getting a bit squeezed out, and that the other obvious option, imperfect though it is, is the option that I supported in the summer, namely Rishi Sunak.

Sebastian Payne
Well, by this time we record next week we will have another prime minister because the race will be over by then. So on Monday we’ll have the first round of shortlisting by Conservative MP or whittled the three down to two. There will also then be an indicative vote to give the membership a sense of who has got the most support among MPs if there are still two candidates because, of course, there could be some backroom dealing. And there’s been suggestions George and I have reported on that, if it is Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt might do a deal with Mr Sunak to be his number two and stop the race going out to the members. But if it does go to the members, we’ll have a nice, safe and secure online poll, which is obviously not open to any kind of interference. And the new PM will be announced next Friday. But until then, George,  Camilla, Paul, thank you so much for joining us. What a week in Westminster it’s been. And that’s it for this episode of Payne’s Politics. If you enjoy the pod, then we’d recommend subscribing. You can find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes every Saturday morning. And also, please leave us a positive review and a nice rating.

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Payne’s Politics was presented by me, Sebastian Payne, and produced by Howie Shannon. The sound engineers were Breen Turner and Jan Sigsworth. Until next time. Thank you for listening.

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