Will the Tory truce hold?

During the summer leadership race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, Sunak’s team were braced for a bloodbath if he won. It would have required a major polling error and gone down as one of the biggest political upsets in recent years. ‘If we win, we win by 1 per cent,’ was how one close ally of Sunak put it at the time.

If this had played out, it would have come as a nasty surprise to many in the Tory party. With wounds still raw from Boris Johnson’s departure, the deposed former PM’s loyalists would have quickly gone on the offensive – accusing Sunak of being a traitor for resigning in Johnson’s dying days. Supporters of Truss, meanwhile, would have claimed the tiny win meant that he didn’t have a mandate for his fiscal plan and pushed instead for immediate tax cuts. The prospect of these rebels in the event of a slim Sunak victory was so bad that it led some MPs in the middle of the party to vote for Truss.

Fast-forward six weeks, however, and Sunak finds himself in a rather different position, having won the support of more than half the parliamentary party. Of course the various crises facing the country have grown since September, but Sunak no longer faces the same amount of volatility in managing the party. ‘It’s gone from near impossible to very difficult,’ says one figure who worked on Sunak’s summer campaign.

Sunak has been helped by the fact that there aren’t that many hardcore Johnson loyalists left after the former prime minister’s abandoned attempt at returning to No. 10. When Johnson announced he was pulling out of the race, many of his key backers – including Priti Patel and James Duddridge, who ran the campaign – switched their allegiances to Sunak.