To determine who should be the next Conservative Party
leader you first need to decide what are the main issues facing Britain. They
are as follows:
1 Winning the next election
2 Keeping the UK intact
3 Making Brexit beneficial to the UK.
4 Raise the average standard of living.
5 Defeat wokeism.
But this is difficult. Some great leaders are easy to
spot, but others come out of nowhere. The past is not always a good guide to
the future. Ulysses Grant was a drunk and a failure before the Civil War, but
was more responsible than anyone else for winning it.
Charisma matters in politics, but less so in the
Britain than in the USA. It’s possible that one of the candidates will discover
charisma in the job, which will help in winning the election, but doing the job
well will help more. None of the
candidates will have Boris’s charisma, but lack of scandal and mistakes may
make up for that.
Charisma rating:
Sunak 6
Truss 4
Mordaunt 7
Badenoch 8
I would rather have intelligence than any other
characteristic. Without intelligence you cannot understand the problem nor can
you understand the solution. Worst of all you cannot distinguish between what
is important and what is trivial.
Sunak has a first from Oxford in PPE, plus an MBA from
Stanford and went on to work for Goldman Sachs.
Truss also studied PPE at Oxford and worked for Shell
and Cable and Wireless.
Mordaunt got a 2.1 in Philosophy at Reading and worked
in public relations and the Navy
Badenoch studied computing at Sussex and then an LLB
at Birkbeck, she worked as a systems analyst for the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Sunak 10
Truss 9
Mordaunt 5
Badenoch 8
The only way we are going to make Brexit beneficial
for the UK is if we have a leader who believes in it. Truss voted Remain and at
Oxford was leader of the Lib Dems. She keeps proposing to get rid of the
Northern Ireland Protocol, but never does so. It may be that she has genuinely converted
from her previous views or it may not.
The key to making Brexit work is to be daring. We need
to undercut the EU and abolish any regulations that hinder British business. We
need to be willing to seriously upset Ireland and the EU or else accept that
Irish unification is a matter of time.
Sunak 8
Truss 6
Mordaunt 7
Badenoch 8
To defeat the SNP long term, it isn’t enough to say No
you have to wait. You have to come up with a new way of thinking about the UK,
that makes us more like countries such as France and Germany that are not
threatened by secession. You have to be imaginative, for instance, making the
SNP an offer they would refuse and finding ways to bypass the devolved parliaments.
You have to have the nerve to do something outrageous if it is necessary to
stop the SNP. After all there is not much point defeating the Russians if you
lose the UK.
Scottish nationalism is an anti-Tory movement, it
would be far harder for Sturgeon to portray either Sunak or Badenoch as English
toffs. Sunak however would be hindered by his personal wealth and his ultra-rich
wife.
Sunak 7
Truss 6
Mordaunt 6
Badenoch 10
Woke issues are not a side issue. They are the whole
issue. Having lost the economic argument in the 1990s the Left turned to
changing how we think in order to change human nature so that we could be made
ready for socialism.
Communism failed because of human nature. We are
naturally capitalists who understand profit, loss and free trade as ways to
personally become better off. We all try to earn more for the benefit of ourselves
and our families.
The task for the Left is to make us care more for
equality than personal self-interest and to care for society more than
ourselves and our families.
This is the purpose of first political correctness and
then woke. Once you can get people to believe that men can become women, it becomes
easier to make them think in a different way about their families and their
selves. If you daughter can become your son, then why can’t a stranger be your
son too?
It seemed initially preposterous that basic ideas
about human nature could be changed, but look how far we have come since the
Berlin Wall came down. Homosexuals can marry, which makes marriage no longer a
matter of family and having children. A lesbian can be a man who thinks he is a
woman who is attracted to another man who thinks he is a woman. Ted Hughes has
been cancelled because of an ancestor who owned slaves.
Mordaunt clearly stated that trans women are women her
attempts to dodge this issue merely make her more dangerous. She also advocated
that the NHS should use homeopathy, which is a pseudoscience that has been
completely debunked. This means that she believes at least two things that are
false.
Badenoch has spoken out at some risk to herself about critical
race theory. She and Sunak are best placed to counter accusations of racism
from Labour and the SNP.
Sunak 8
Truss 6
Mordaunt 0
Badenoch 10
Mordaunt’s work in public relations means that she is
good at communications, but she fundamentally lacks substance. Her views on woke
issues ought to make it impossible that she become Conservative Party leader.
It is extraordinary and surely a mistake that she has come so far.
Sunak understanding of finance and general
intelligence could be hugely useful in a leader, but he has the disadvantage of
being in part responsible for the mess we are in now. His wealth would make it
easy for Labour and the SNP to attack him.
Truss has achieved little despite her experience in Cabinet. She may be a right winger, but I don’t trust
her previous commitments both to Remain and the Lib Dems.
Badenoch would be the ideal candidate to take on woke
and Labour and SNP accusations of racist Tories. Her main disadvantage is lack
of experience at the highest level.
There is a window of opportunity for leadership
candidates. Too young and you don’t have the experience, too old and you have
missed your chance.
We have very limited information to choose. If it were
up to me, I would take a chance on the next two years. If the Tories lose the
next election they can pick a new leader, then anyway. Truss offers little, Sunak
would be better as Chancellor.
The leader both the SNP and Labour fear most would be
Kemi Badenoch.
