New Delhi: The rebels on the backbenches of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party are said to be plotting to replace Liz Truss as party leader and Prime Minister involving former leadership rival Rishi Sunak with a so-called “unity” joint ticket team, as reported by the news agency PTI.
This comes after a YouGov poll for ‘The Times’ revealed that almost half of Tory party supporters believe the party chose the wrong candidate in the leadership election.
According to the YouGov poll, among those who voted for the Conservatives at the last election, 62 per cent said that party members had made the wrong choice when the race was shortlisted between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, and 15 per cent said they had gotten it right.
The poll created panic among the Tory members of Parliament to start considering alternatives from the candidates who secured the most votes within the parliamentary party – the British Indian former Chancellor, who was the frontrunner with his colleagues, and Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt, who came in third.
The British government is currently reeling from the impact of the controversial mini-budget at the end of last month, with UK Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng flying back from an International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting in Washington a day earlier than planned.
After the meetings at 10 Downing Street more U-turns on the tax-cutting plans are expected. The Tory backbenchers are said to be weighing up the prospect of changing the party leader yet again, as reported by PTI.
Truss technically cannot face a leadership challenge unless until 12 months unless the powerful 1922 Committee of backbench MPs vote to change their rules. The MPs are expected to consider the possibility of rallying behind a joint team of Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt.
Another option is for Penny Mordaunt to take over as party leader and Prime Minister and Rishi Sunak as Chancellor, given his track record in office at the Treasury and that he had warned of much of the turmoil that has since unleashed under Truss.
“A coronation won’t be that hard to arrange,” a senior Tory was quoted as saying in ‘The Times’ PTI reported
The party believes a pact is possible between Rishi Sunak, who lost to Truss in the party membership vote 57 to 43 per cent, and Penny Mordaunt who came in third in the early stage of the voting among MPs and then threw her support behind Truss.
However, former prime minister Boris Johnson loyalists have condemned such plotting and termed it as anti-democratic by disgruntled Rishi Sunak backers. “No offence to Rishi Sunak or Penny 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.
This comes just a day after UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly warned the rebels that it would be a “disastrously bad idea” to think about Truss’s replacement as the Tory leader, just over a month after she was elected 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)