Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Could Sunak implode?

Don’t rule it out

(Getty)

There are few positions so perilous as being the frontrunner in a party leadership contest. Just being the heir apparent when no contest is happening is dicey enough, with the incumbent leader usually highly susceptible to murmurings from courtiers about your alleged manoeuvrings against him.

But once the race is actively underway things get even more dangerous. You become the contender everyone else needs to destroy before the decisive round of voting gets underway. Them’s the breaks right now for Rishi Sunak, the golden boy with the silver tongue who kept many people’s businesses afloat and the economy out of a long-term slump during the pandemic. He is easily the bookies’ favourite to take over from Boris Johnson and has a comfortable lead in MP endorsements as well. It would certainly take a dramatic collapse to prevent him from reaching the final two candidates, on which the wider party membership will vote on.

And yet such a collapse is not beyond the bounds of realistic possibility and neither is the idea of the party grassroots exacting a terrible vengeance against him over the ousting of Boris Johnson. Sunak finds himself in the Heseltine position of being the would-be replacement most blamed for the downfall of an extraordinary, election-winning leader. It is widely reported that Johnson himself is gunning for him, convinced that Sunak has been plotting against him for months.

The Sunak campaign reminds me of nothing so much as the Michael Portillo leadership bid of 2001

There’s also the fact that Sunak registered his leadership website just days after the first major partygate story broke back in December. Then there’s the fact he delivered his ‘I wouldn’t have said it’ attack on Boris Johnson’s jibe about Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile on the very day that Johnson’s policy chief Munira Mirza walked out (who, incidentally, is married to one of Sunak’s best friends); and the fact, too, that the ‘career psychopath’ Dominic Cummings, that obsessive destroyer of Johnson, is known to be a Sunak admirer.

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