Having time and again emphasised the silliness of political betting where one is not an insider I trust I may be forgiven for offering the background to a bet where I cannot reasonably claim to know what I am talking about. My consolation is that around 200,000 members of the Conservative Party will now express an opinion where comfortably fewer than 1% have any idea as to what they are talking about. My point is that selecting a prime minister can only be done by the selector having experienced close up work with the candidate.
That noted, I blunder on. I have bet £10,000 on Sunak to be the next prime minister since my expert in politics says that he is by far and away the better candidate. Despite yesterday’s voting he thinks Sunak at Evens is still a bet.
Talking of yesterday’s voting an important vote has been omitted. This is what would the votes have been if Mordaunt’s losing faction were free to vote on either of the last two? Well, in this life you can’t have everything.
What strikes me about Truss is her steely gaze to mask her ignorance. Sunak does not have to fake his stance.
Truss criticises Sunak for his “managerialism”. This word means little to me. Its use is intended to be critical. But, if anything, it highlights that Sunak is a competent manager and believes in so being. How could that be a criticism? Does Truss think that the successful candidate should be incompetent?
Sunak knows the gilts market since he learnt all about it when he was at Goldman Sachs. Whereas Truss knows hardly anything by comparison. For decades after WWII the cost of debt thereby incurred hung over Britain. It took a lot to shake it off. (Whereupon, of course, Blair and Brown set about bankrupting the UK.) Accordingly, Sunak knows what he is doing and why. So all this talk of an emergency budget served up by Truss is based on her ignorance or posing. Given that she wishes an emergency budget merely to differentiate herself from Sunak voters have been warned.