The launch of “Liz for leader” was amateurish and chaotic and did not bode well. Truss was introduced by business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, but for an excruciating minute she did not appear. Willing to serve, perhaps, but not quite ready to explain why she had to. When she appeared, Truss, the secretary of state, tripped over her words, at one point referring to “Putin’s horrible war in Ru…Ukraine.” Then she couldn’t find her way out of the room and headed straight for a window. Truss’s early wrong turns were contrasted – and coincided – with a wave of support for the initially more confident Penny Mordaunt. While Rishi Sunak topped the Tory MP ballot at every stage, the former defense secretary appeared, in her brief moment in the sun, to be Margaret Thatcher’s most likely successor to Truss. Wrapping herself in the union jack at the launch of PM4PM the day before the Truss event, Mordaunt had stirred Tory emotions by recalling watching the Falklands fleet sail from Portsmouth as a young lady. The image, and her long-standing support for Brexit, helped her briefly come second behind Sunak on the MP ballot. For Truss, in the early days, while the contest centered on Westminster, it all seemed an unequal contest. It was criticized for lacking polish and appeal and for sounding wooden. Backing Remain in 2016 and being a member of the Lib Dems in her student years were not features on her CV that were going to help. Nor are parliamentary colleagues flocking to her. In the first round of voting, he had received only 50 supporters in a parliamentary party of 357 members – just 10 more than junior minister Kemi Badenoch, who was attracting far more positive headlines. But the Mordaunt frenzy was to prove short-lived and Badenoch would be finished. Mordaunt had described Boris Johnson’s prime ministership as a “failed model”, which did not go down well with some MPs on the right of the party. The Tories’ residual loyalty and impressive levels of nostalgia for Johnson would play a large role throughout the campaign among both MPs and party members, helping Truss at every turn. However, it was Mordaunt’s views on transgender issues that really burst her campaign bubble, sinking her hopes and reviving Truce. In a days-long barrage, the Tory press ripped Mordant for her “woke” views in the not-too-distant past and suggested her attempts to downplay them were disingenuous and unbecoming of a future prime minister. Deals were struck on the right between MPs who had supported former attorney general Suella Braverman and the Truss camp. Playing the role of the continuity candidate who had remained loyal to Johnson, Truss edged out Mordaunt in the last, decisive vote of MPs to reach the bottom two with Sunak. Six weeks of deliberations followed across the UK, with around 150,000 Tory members making the final choice. Kemi Badenoch after announcing that she will run for captaincy. attracted positive headlines. Photo: Joshua Bratt/Alamy Tomorrow, at 12.30pm, Truss will almost certainly cap off a remarkable comeback and an impressive election success among Tory members when she is announced as the clear winner and the party’s next leader. Then on Tuesday, barring a huge upset that would make a mockery of several member polls that put her far ahead, she will fly to Balmoral to meet the Queen and return as prime minister, before appointing her cabinet and government. The results of the three previous Tory leadership campaigns were fairly easy to explain. In 2005 David Cameron was the confident new Tory modernizer, the Conservative answer to Tony Blair, while David Davis overrepresented the old guard. In 2015 Theresa May won without a member’s vote when Andrea Leadsom withdrew. Then in 2019 Boris Johnson was the clear favorite of the party that had led the country through Brexit and promised to see it through, crushing Jeremy Hunt, the less charismatic but more stable former health secretary, Remainer and technocrat. With Truss’s victory, historians will have a more difficult job. He made it to the final second round with the support of just 32% of Tory MPs, compared to Sunak’s 38%. Johnson was on 51% at the same stage in 2019. On the night Truss narrowly beat Moredown to secure her place in the bottom two with Sunak, several Tory MPs were in open despair at the prospect of a Truss premiership. One said it was “like 1995 if we had elected John Redwood”. Nor does he seem very popular with Tory voters in 2019 – a group much wider than the membership, admittedly, but with a lot of overlap and clearly vital to the party’s chances of winning again. In our Opinium poll this weekend, just 21% of Tory voters in 2019 say she looks like a prime minister-in-waiting (down nine points since August 3) compared to 27% who say Sunak does (down three points) . So how did Truss pull it off – assuming he did – and convince Tory members that it’s her? Former Tory MP and minister Paul Goodman, who now edits ConservativeHome, sums it up in one word: “adaptability”. “She is the ex-Remainer who is now the favorite of the Leavers. She is the former Lib Dem who is now the hero of the Tory right and is the new kid on the block who has been in the Cabinet for eight years.’ Another former minister and Tory MP notes: “Liz is a very clever operator with very strong political instincts that people often don’t always recognise. He has spent a lot of time with people in the party, those who vote.” It is this experience that has helped her to judge just how to appeal to the very special interests of the Tory “electoral body” – a group on the far right of Conservative supporters in general. Part of her adaptability, her supporters say, involved finding simple ways to turn her apparent weaknesses into strengths — playing the cards of honesty and loyalty for all they were worth. From the start, she also made a virtue of her cheap £4.50 earrings, contrasting with Sunak’s £450 Prada shoes. Supporters applaud Liz Truss outside parliament. Photo: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images Luke Trill, a former Tory special adviser and now director of More in Common, an organization which has organized regular focus groups on the candidates, said people were taken by Tras’s apparent straightforwardness – her usual person and politician. They were qualities that resonated more in the country than in the Westminster bubble. “What many commentators saw as Liz’s weaknesses, she turned into strengths. People repeatedly said they liked the fact that he was straight-talking and “actually answered the question.” They liked that he talked about coming from a comprehensive school in Leeds. I know people in SW1 are sick of hearing it, but apparently most of the audience only hears it once. “When she said, ‘I’m not the smartest candidate,’ people liked it because it sounded honest and humble. What is most evident from the focus groups is that people are not looking, in 2022, for a Blair 2.0, but someone who ‘gets it’ during a cost of living crisis and was more convinced that he got it. Instead, what made Sunak so appealing to many commentators was that he made audiences think he was too sophisticated and they didn’t like how he approached Liz in debates. When she asked her what she regretted most – being a Lib Dem or voting Remain – people thought it was cheap.” Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. By contrast, Sunak’s recent history – revelations about his extreme wealth and tax affairs, and his decision to stand down over Boris Johnson’s leadership failures – has hurt and added to the impression that Truss is somehow more in tune with the values of party members. MPs say Truss’s loyalty to Johnson was instrumental in shaping members’ views. “A big part of it is that a very large section of members – and a good chunk of MPs too – were totally opposed to Rishi,” said a senior MP. “He was, in their eyes, the man who stabbed Boris in the back. When I talk to members, people have so little real enthusiasm for her. It was all ‘it can’t be Rishi’. Even her supporters say Truss got lucky with the timing of the contest. “If Rishi was able to have a place in the leadership towards the end of last year [before stories about his tax affairs emerged], he would have walked it,” said a former cabinet minister. “Things have evolved since then. We had the cost of living crisis and a lot of people felt that Rishi wasn’t really giving answers. If anything, he was very slick. I think people thought that this man might not have authenticity. And then there were a few omissions, like the reference to his daughters eating a McDonald’s breakfast package that hadn’t been released in two years. Then there was his wealth, which I didn’t see as an issue, but the members did. It was also obvious that he completely shut up about the prime ministership. There was a sense that he had to take it down a peg or two.” Some supporters of Sunak believe there was an element of latent racism, although they cannot prove it. “There are still some around who think we need a white man or a white woman,” said one. Another MP said: “There is a feeling that…
