What a difference a brief makes

How Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have used their Cabinet platforms to gain momentum for leadership bids among surprising backers.

As speculation surrounding a prospective vote of no confidence against Boris Johnson continues to mount, ever more attention is turning to the candidates vying to be his replacement. The current frontrunners, according to recent polling of the Conservative Party membership, are the Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

Earlier this month, YouGov data showed that, when presented with a long list of prospective candidates, 33% of Conservative party members would vote for Sunak, while 25% would vote Truss.

Any other potential leadership candidate you might care to name (for example Jeremy Hunt, whose reported non-aggression pact with Sunak might look a little less helpful now given these figures, Priti Patel, and Dominic Raab) is way back in single figures, far behind the two front runners.

More recent data from Opinium (asking a slightly different question) showed very much the same patterns. Sunak ahead, Truss not far behind, all others back in the starting blocks.

While the horse race between Johnson’s prospective usurpers is of course the headline news, there is so much else going on in the membership polling data collected and published by YouGov and Sky News. Most intriguing is their respective bases of current support.

Given that Truss is the leading female candidate and was a vocal Remainer in the 2016 EU referendum, we would (by applying basic theories of descriptive representation) probably expect Conservative women members and Remain voters to be breaking toward her. Similarly, we would expect Sunak to be pulling in a lot of Leave voters, given his support for the UK’s exiting the EU in 2016, and to be polling strongest among men.

But in fact, we see the opposite; Sunak is more popular with Remainers than Leavers and with women than men. In turn, Truss is more popular with Leavers and men.

According to YouGov figures, while Truss attracts the support of 15% of members who voted Remain in 2016, she has almost double the proportion of those who voted Leave currently backing her (28%). Indeed, her support among Leavers is practically equal to that of Rishi Sunak’s (30%), but the Chancellor is streets ahead on the other side of the divide. There, while 15% of Tory-Remainers support Truss, almost half (45%) back Sunak.

What, I think, drives this surprising finding are the governmental briefs that Truss and Sunak have had over the last couple of years, and how this has widened their appeal to different parts of the membership.

For Liz Truss, her role as Trade Secretary (and more recently, Foreign Secretary) essentially allowed her to become the face of the ‘global Britain’ post-Brexit project. Photos of Truss signing trade deals have been a pretty regular feature on social media channels throughout the past two years. In every sense, these were a strong visual representation of what many (Tory) Leavers wanted from post-Brexit Britain. Arguably, building that same imagery had a lot to do with Truss’ promotion to the Foreign brief last Autumn. It appears now to be buying her a lot of favour with Tory-Leavers.

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak’s work as Chancellor during the pandemic has built a comparatively strong set of polling figures among Conservative members and the general public. While Boris Johnson’s net personal favourability ratings currently sit at an awful -52, Sunak’s are at relatively rosy -4 (Keir Starmer by comparison has a figure of -19). In data collected earlier in January, prior to the recent explosions of chaos at Westminster, already almost half (46%) of the Conservative Party membership thought that Chancellor Rishi Sunak would make a better leader than the current Prime Minister. Just 16% thought Johnson is a better choice.

Sunak’s management of the economy during the pandemic, including the furlough scheme and business relief grants, has played well with both the public and Tory members. For instance, 59% of public think that the furlough scheme has been a success, and Sunak’s front-running position for next leader is testament to the regard in which the membership hold him. And if their current leadership vote intention is anything to go by, Tory-Remainers, for whom no doubt the economic impact of Brexit was crucial to their 2016 thinking, appear to be more impressed than most with Sunak’s work.

If indeed economic matters are high on the thinking agenda of Conservative party members who voted Remain in 2016, then it stands to reason that in the early stages of the campaign they are falling in behind a Chancellor who’s own personal brand is defying the plummeting ratings of his Prime Minister, government, and party.

The gender gap remains quite perplexing. It could be a genuine differential in need of further investigation, or it could be an artefact of some other dynamic in patterns of support.

For instance, it could be the case that Conservative-Remainers are more likely to be women. In which case, if Sunak draws more support from Conservative-Remainers, then he therefore will draw (proportionally) more support from women. The opposite would then be true for Truss.

Or, it could be another example of the criticism often levelled at theories (or expectations) of descriptive representation – it is a little too simplistic. The modern voter (in general and membership perspectives) is a complex animal, and (modern) representatives do not necessarily serve or put the interests of their own social groups first. Therefore, perhaps we should not expect the Conservative membership to align along gender divides in a leadership contest after all.

As we move closer and closer toward a leadership ballot, how (and if) the various Tory membership coalitions move behind and change between candidates will be fascinating to watch.

Will Sunak hold on to Remainers once the campaign begins, and questions about the UK’s ongoing and future relationship with the EU are raised? Will another, perhaps a ‘genuine Brexiteer’, candidate swoop in and poach Truss’ Leavers? How will Scottish Conservative members react to increasingly intense divides between their local representatives and the government at Westminster?

Despite the early starting positions for Sunak and Truss, it is still all to play for. Just think back to the drama of the 2016 Conservative leadership election for a reminder as to how these battles can go.