FOR POLITICAL ANORAKS, and indeed members of the Conservative Party, today will be like waking up on Christmas morning and wondering what might be left under the Christmas tree. You have hoped beyond hope that what you have politely asked for will be there, but you just don’t know for sure.
Dutifully unveiling it all will be Sir Graham Brady MP. As chairman of the 1922 committee, Brady and his team will have spent the weekend tallying the votes and come 12:30pm he will let everyone know whether Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak will be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
The winning candidate will have to wait until tomorrow to be formally asked to form a government by Queen Elizabeth, who, in a break with tradition, will have an audience with the new leader at Balmoral in Scotland rather than Buckingham Palace.
It has been a long road to Downing Street for Truss and Sunak.
Boris Johnson led his party to win a stonking majority in December 2019. Yet, by the summer of ’22 the government unravelled.
The final straw appeared to be Johnson’s evolving story about what he knew and when about the behaviour of his deputy chief whip Chris Pincher. In June, Pincher was accused of groping two men at a private members club. Pincher subsequently resigned from his job as deputy chief whip and was suspended from the Conservative Party, but he still retains his seat on the green benches of the House of Commons.
Boris Johnson’s announcement on 7 July that he would stand down as leader of the Conservative Party started what has felt like a very long summer of internal campaigning and wrangling.
All of that will come to an end today.
Rishi Sunak initially started out as the leader of the pack, but as the candidates whittled down so too did momentum and Sunak is now the self-styled underdog.
Opinion polls among Conservative voters throughout the campaign have consistently pointed towards Truss as winning the race.
For Sunak to turn it around now he would certainly win the accolade of come-back king.
The campaign itself has been relatively straightforward.
At the hustings in Belfast both reaffirmed their support for the Protocol Bill. When it was first introduced earlier this year, the Protocol Bill was met with some consternation from Simon Coveney. At the time the Foreign Affairs minister said the move would “damage trust” and make it “more difficult to find a solution”.
With the fault lines between the two candidates appearing to be less on GB-NI trade routes, and more about how they will address soaring inflation and the cost of living, it remains to be seen whether the new Prime Minister will seek to repair relationships with the Irish government and the EU, or plough on regardless.
An article in the Financial Times this summer suggested that Liz Truss, if she becomes Prime Minister, would consider triggering Article 16 within days of taking office.
The Northern Ireland assembly remains empty. The DUP declined to form a power sharing executive following May’s elections, saying they won’t go into government until issues around the protocol are resolved. They believe the Protocol itself damages NI’s place within the union. Will the Protocol Bill be enough to convince the DUP to form an executive?
Unless there is an agreement to form a government at Stormont by 28 October, the NI secretary of state will either have to call a fresh election or, more likely they could fast track legislation through Westminster to extend the deadline.
The assembly elections in May resulted in Sinn Fein coming out on top with deputy leader Michelle O’Neill set to take the office of First Minister – the very first time the position will go to a nationalist rather than unionist.
Reset relations
At the weekend the Taoiseach Micheál Martin said a new Prime Minister was an opportunity to “reset relations” with the UK. And with a new Prime Minister, there will also be a new Foreign Secretary and Northern Ireland Secretary of State.
What may have perhaps raised a few eyebrows were the comments Liz Truss made about other politicians during the campaign. From saying she’d ignore Scotland’s First Minister and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon to declining to say whether the President of the UK’s nearest continental neighbour France was a friend or foe.
And at home, Truss’ declaration that Sinn Fein wished to drive a wedge between GB and NI was met with some wry headlines.
Critics may have questioned her diplomatic acumen following the comments, but this was a Liz Truss who was very much speaking to the home crowd. Supporters would point to her steadfast commitment to supporting Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, and she was the Foreign Secretary under whom Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released from Iran and able to return to the UK.
Rishi Sunak is not gaffe-proof either. His minor misstep during the campaign was telling the public his go-to order from McDonald’s – which happened to be an item that was removed from the menu a few years ago.
Regardless whether it’s Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss, the new Prime Minister has many big decisions to make almost immediately. Undoubtedly the most pressing is to lay out a detailed plan to address soaring energy prices.
Originally from Derry, Christina McSorley is a journalist with the BBC’s politics team based in Westminster.
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