Rishi Sunak

@vivify said

What's interesting is that Boris Johnson received 54 votes as the runner-up, despite his resigning only last month.

He didn't actually receive 54 votes, because in the end it didn't come to a vote. Both Johnson and the third candidate, Penny Mordaunt, withdrew. So that number referred to the people who had announced they would support Johnson in the ballot of Tory MPs. I think we can assume that he didn't have the 100 supporters necessary to progress to the members ballot and preferred to withdraw than to lose.

So the top two candidates for party leader were two people who resigned from the same cabinet only a few weeks ago. What a mess.

It's kind of weird to equate them, since they resigned for completely different reasons. Sunak resigned from the cabinet, like many others, in the effort to make Johnson's government unworkable, because a) he'd come to the conclusion that Johnson was a liability to the party, and b) he had (obviously) leadership ambitions of his own. Neither motive was especially noble, but both were perfectly legitimate.

Johnson, on the other hand, resigned because his corruption had become so obvious even to his own party that his authority was smashed to pieces, and because increasingly he couldn't persuade ministers to serve under him.

It is indeed a bit of a mess that Johnson was even in the running this time round, let alone there were more than 50 Tory MPs still prepared openly to support him. It isn't especially a mess that Sunak resigned this summer; at that stage, staying in Johnson's cabinet, rather than leaving it, should be viewed as a disqualification for office. Indeed (apart from the fact that he's still, when all is said and done, a Tory) my major reservation about the new PM is that he remained an ally of Boris' as long as he did.

@kevcvs57 said

yeah given that everyone understands that they are voting for a particular PM and their associated manifesto, then yes they should return to the people and present those two things to them, especially the manifesto aspect.

But everyone shouldn't understand that; it's a misunderstanding of how the British political system is meant to work. They should understand that they're voting for a party (not a PM) and its manifesto. Our politics would be healthier if they were more depersonalised; a change in leadership shouldn't, ideally, make much of a difference. It didn't when Home succeeded Macmillan, or when Callaghan succeeded Wilson - but these were people who actually understood how our unwritten constitution is meant to work.

A Tory PM is a Tory PM and it doesn’t bother me which one is in or out but a manifesto is a contract made with the electorate and breaking that contract is certainly a reason going back to the people.

Trouble is, there's no actually way of enforcing promises made in a manifesto, which is how Truss could make her dramatic and catastrophic effort to transform Tory policy on becoming PM. Perhaps we should actually be able to treat a manifesto as a legal contract, and sue if it's broken.

@teinosuke said
yeah given that everyone understands that they are voting for a particular PM and their associated manifesto, then yes they should return to the people and present those two things to them, especially the manifesto aspect.

But everyone shouldn't understand that; it's a misunderstanding of how the British political system is meant to work. They should understand th ...[text shortened]... Perhaps we should actually be able to treat a manifesto as a legal contract, and sue if it's broken.

The manifesto is everything party and it’s temporary leader is nothing.
When you negotiate a maintenance contract your not interested in the name if the company or who the CEO is you should be interested only in what the contract promises to deliver in terms scope and response times etc.
I don’t think you understand how UK parliamentary democracy works, half the electorate would not be able to tell you who their MP actually is, all could tell you who the party leader is because they are the person who lays out the manifesto to the electorate, namely what they are promising to do and how they plan to deliver it, in practical terms it’s all that matters.
Anything other than that is a slavish adherence to party colours or the cult of personality regarding the leader of any given party.

@kevcvs57 said
The manifesto is everything party and it’s temporary leader is nothing.
When you negotiate a maintenance contract your not interested in the name if the company or who the CEO is you should be interested only in what the contract promises to deliver in terms scope and response times etc.
I don’t think you understand how UK parliamentary democracy works, half the electorate ...[text shortened]... they are promising to do and how they plan to deliver it, in practical terms it’s all that matters.

I think in 1959 the British public would have explained to you, correctly, that they were voting not (primarily) for Macmillan or Gaitskell, but for the Tories or Labour, on the basis partly of the policies in their manifestos - but also on their basis of their class loyalties and general assumptions about whose interests each party favoured.

That's how it should be. The PM is supposed to be first among equals, no more. We would of course benefit from more localism in British politics, and it's a crying shame that, as you say, people often don't know who their local MP is - in a healthy system, s/he would be representing a community's interests in parliament, and would be chosen on the basis of his/her abilities to do so. The party, however, does matter - partly because the party is what issues the manifesto, but also because its conduct over decades is a reasonably reliable guide to how it will behave next time it's in office.

The manifesto isn't "everything" in the way that a contract is, because it can't be legally enforced. This is simply a fact; a party isn't a company; a party leader isn't a CEO; a manifesto isn't a legally binding contract.

The reason for this is obvious. Five years is a long time, and circumstances change. Politicians have to be allowed the flexibility to respond to "events, dear boy, events". In 2019, the Conservative manifesto was focused (understandably) on Brexit. Nobody guessed at COVID, nor at the war in Ukraine. A political manifesto is best described as an aspiration based on the assumption that present trends continue - which they never do.

@teinosuke said
I think in 1959 the British public would have explained to you, correctly, that they were voting not (primarily) for Macmillan or Gaitskell, but for the Tories or Labour, on the basis partly of the policies in their manifestos - but also on their basis of their class loyalties and general assumptions about whose interests each party favoured.

That's how it should be. The ...[text shortened]... scribed as an aspiration based on the assumption that present trends continue - which they never do.

No people do not do that anymore but it normally results in the same class lines being drawn on the electoral map.
But if a Tory party leader like BoJo campaigns on a manifesto of getting Brexit sorted and “levelling up” that blurs those lines, same with focusing on immigration, because there are people of all social classes who fear and resent immigration.
Liz Truss tossed the levelling up aspect of the manifesto in the bin and opted for an extreme plutocratic policy direction which was a gross departure from the contract Boris made with the usually loyal working class labour voters, if Sunak more sneakily leaves it sitting in the bin then there should a general election and all parties can present their revised manifesto’s to the people.

-Removed-

Well I personally don’t think you can make a hard and fast rule for the reasons I’ve mentioned but we are all grown ups and we know when a person or party is abusing the wriggle room that they have, as mentioned in other posts I’m much less interested in how far a party diverges from the manifesto that the electorate gave their mandate to at the election than who won the back of house internal bun fight regarding leadership.
Liz Truss was far from a like for like change of leadership and the jury is still out in Sunak in that regard.

@teinosuke said
It's kind of weird to equate them, since they resigned for completely different reasons. Sunak resigned from the cabinet, like many others, in the effort to make Johnson's government unworkable, because a) he'd come to the conclusion that Johnson was a liability to the party, and b) he had (obviously) leadership ambitions of his own. Neither motive was especially noble, but both were perfectly legitimate.

That's... a very generous spin to put on Sunak's back-stabbing.

The best I could put it is that Johnson roundly deserved to be stabbed in the back, but I still wouldn't trust those who did it ever again.

It'd have been different if Sunak had had the balls to stab Johnson and Truss in the front. But he didn't.