Suella’s plea to the ERG: back Truss

Having urged her supporters to back Liz Truss yesterday, Suella Braverman has now been forced to, er, do the same again today. Team Truss are doing their damnedest to try to lock up the right-wing vote by sending out leading figures like Lord Frost and Simon Clarke to urge rival candidates to stand aside.

Unfortunately for the Foreign Secretary, thus far the Badenoch camp seem noticeably reluctant to do just that. While not all of her supporters still think she could make the final two, others have their doubts about Truss and her electoral prowess. Braverman’s latest appeal therefore is an attempt to remind right-wingers that, unless they unite sharpish, the final two presented to party members are likely to be Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt. Neither are especially regarded as being part of the Tory right.

The Attorney-General has now told the 27 MPs who backed her on the second ballot that ‘Liz and Kemi are not both going to make it into the final two. So a decision needs to be made to back one of them. The one we should back, I’d argue, is the one who can get to the final round: Liz can, Kemi cannot.’ Intriguingly, Braverman also says that ‘Liz has given me a personal guarantee that she’ll do what it takes to end the appalling human misery of the illegal channel crossings.’

Just what does that exactly entail? And will all this be enough to convince Braverman’s European Research Group backers to switch to Liz Truss, a Remainer, and not Kemi Badenoch, a Brexiteer?