How many more Tories will announce they’re stepping down at the next election? They need to tell the party in the next two weeks whether they want to do it or not, though there is no obligation for them to share their decision more widely.
I understand that Rishi Sunak and his team have been working extremely hard to convince a lot of wavering MPs who wonder what the point is. Most of them expect their party to go into the misery of opposition at the next election, and don’t want to be stuck in those doldrums. Many are worried that they will be among those who lose their seats in that defeat, and can’t face the exhaustion of the campaign followed by the indignity of losing their job in public. Sunak’s basic pitch to his colleagues has been that there is still a path through to rescuing this, that the party is on the way to fixing the first big problem of the economic turmoil, and that things will start to look up soon.
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