What’s Rishi Sunak’s pitch?

Rishi Sunak has passed the 100 publicly-declared supporters which, it if is converted to nominations when Sunak officially declares, will meet the threshold required to make Monday’s MPs vote. Boris Johnson (like Sunak, not yet officially declared a candidate), is somewhat behind at around 70. Penny Mordaunt, who officially declared on Friday, is further back, in the mid-20s. There are a lot of MPs yet to declare, but as things stand it is looking plausible that either Sunak is the only candidate to make the nominations threshold or that it is a Johnson vs Sunak run-off.

In that event, it seems very likely that Boris would win. Tory members were not happy that Boris was deposed, and are likely to have taken a very dim view of their chosen successor to him, Liz Truss, being so badly undermined by her own MPs through her brief and infelicitous stint in office. Sunak would have very little time to create any new message to change any minds.

If Sunak did have a message, it might have to be that he was the favourite of MPs and in the end the MPs have to back the policies of whoever the leader is. That is, of course, a compelling reason for not having members participate at all in choosing the leader, especially when their party is in office and that leader has to implement policy. But the 1922 Committee has agreed on the procedure we have, so members will have their say even on this occasion.

Sunak’s message along such lines might not be terribly compelling anyway. When Liz Truss became leader, backers of her opponents immediately started attacking her even more venomously than their Labour or SNP competitors. She was totally undermined from the start and forced to U-turn on her entire agenda. Sunak is not going to have a majority of members of the House of Commons back him for Tory leader. So if he’s to carry a majority in the Commons, he’ll need Tory MPs that backed other candidates to row in behind him and back him in what will be very difficult times ahead. Yet he will be asking them to do that even though MPs that backed him did not remotely extend that same courtesy to Truss. What was sauce for the Truss goose – disloyalty on an epic scale – is apparently not to be sauce for the Sunak gander.

Backers of other candidates may take a different view. It seems unlikely that whichever of Sunak or Johnson wins (assuming it is one of those two) will be able to command anything close to a consistent majority in the House, and will have to navigate the period up to the next general election through some skillful placating of different Tory factions and occasional inducing of Labour, Lib Dem or other opposition support.

That period is scheduled to be more than two years. It may in practice be more like weeks. This is the Tories’ last chance. If they can’t back whoever wins the leadership this time, to the hilt, so as to enable (presumably) him to implement his agenda whatever it is, it’ll have to be an imminent general election and Labour taking over.