Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss named finalists to be next U.K. prime minister
While Boris Johnson continues as a kind of happy-go-lucky caretaker prime minister, the race to replace him will now go before the 200,000 or so dues-paying Conservative Party members, who will select, via mail-in ballot, Johnson’s successor.
Most of Britain is sitting on the sidelines for all of this. There will be no general election to pick the new prime minister, and although a televised debate is scheduled for Monday, many of the “hustings” events will be off the record or closed to press.
The matchup between Sunak and Truss offers Tory voters a choice between a man who says he is the only adult in the race and a woman who says she is the only one who has shown true leadership.
The two contenders are both conservative, and to the outside world, their political differences are subtle.
Truss, 46, supports a bunch of tax cuts.
Sunak, 42, says that her plan is “fantasy island” economics and that Britain must first get inflation under control.
The taxes of Sunak’s own family are a bit of a sore point. And earlier this year it looked like his aspirations for higher office might be over after reports that his wife had avoided millions in taxes on her foreign earnings.
Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs heavy, married really rich. Akshata Murty, whom he met at Stanford, is the daughter of N.R. Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire who founded Infosys. The couple made the Sunday Times list of Britain’s wealthiest 250 people, with a joint fortune estimated at 730 million pounds, or about $875 million.
Their family moved out of the chancellor of the exchequer’s official residence amid the tax controversy in April. But Sunak stayed on as the country’s finance minister — until his strident resignation this month launched the revolt against Johnson.
Truss didn’t speak out against Johnson until it was clear the tide had turned.
She is Britain’s first Tory female foreign secretary, who — in an echo of Hillary Clinton — says she is ready to run the country “from day one.”
If she won, it would be the third time that the Conservative Party put a woman in the country’s highest office, following the premierships of Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
Truss has won praise for her support of Ukraine — and has been a target of criticism from Russia.
Although she opposed Brexit in the 2016 referendum, she has since said she regrets that vote, and she has been a prominent voice for the argument that Britain needs to rewrite the provisions on Northern Ireland in its post-Brexit trade agreement. She is a passionate free-marketer.
Sunak was the front-runner through the first, parliamentary stage of the contest, winning every round. Now, though, as the two finalists make their pitches to…
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