Team Sunak gear up for ground war

With most signs pointing to a Liz Truss triumph, team Sunak have been pulling out all the stops in a bid to make up lost ground. Tory membership ballots go out this week and although the rules technically allow members to vote a second time online if they change their mind, neither camp expects this to play a big factor. This means the next few days will be critical to the final result, announced on 5 September. And now that the ‘air war’ of TV debates and initial hustings has concluded, it means that the ‘ground game’ of face-to-face meetings with members matters all the more.

Rishi Sunak has therefore been out pressing the flesh with the grassroots all weekend, to try to win as many over in-person as possible. Staff were told at campaign HQ this morning that he met 2,000 members face to face this weekend in constituencies where 10,000 Tory members are based. It’s part of a constituency blitz that will see him tour the north, south west, south east, west Midlands, Wales, Scotland and be back in London for the Sky hustings, all in the space of just a week. Backbencher Richard Holden, who worked on Boris Johnson’s successful 2019 leadership bid, has now been drafted in to help with such visits as part of a ‘crack team’ which boasts Olivia Leechman, formerly of the Treasury.

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One source suggested to Mr S that it ‘definitely feels like something is happening at the grassroots which isn’t showing in the polls yet. Rishi respects the members: he’s happy to be scrutinised, he’s putting the hours in to talk to them and not stage managing every visit.’ Another contrasted yesterday’s European Championship final: Liz Truss took time out of the campaign to attend the game at Wembley while Sunak watched it in a pub between meeting members.

The south west in particular is hoped to be potentially fruitful ground for Sunak, given the high number of Tory-held, Lib Dem facing seats where Sir Ed Davey’s party is the nearest competition. Supporters suggest Sunak stands a better chance of retaining these at the next election than Liz Truss. They point to the number of MPs in such seats who are backing the former Chancellor with Richard Graham and Alex Chalk among the half-a-dozen MPs who welcomed Sunak to the Cotswalds yesterday.

The Lib Dem threat isn’t just contained to the south west of course, as perhaps evidenced by the endorsements of MPs elsewhere in the south of the country like Bim Afolami in Hertfordshire and Angela Richardson in Surrey. Similarly Fay Jones and Craig Williams in Wales both sit for former Lib Dem seats in Wales while Peter Fleet, who came second to the Lib Dems at last year’s Chesham and Amersham by-election, is also backing Rishi.

Sunak supporters trumpet their man winning the most endorsements from MPs: given that their first instinct is self-preservation, surely they know their local patches best and which candidate is most likely to save their seats next time around? If councillors and local members share such concerns, the thinking goes, then they too will back Sunak. Naturally, team Truss dispute this and highlight their candidate overtaking Sunak in recent polls: proof, they say, that she too can win an election against Sir Keir Starmer.

Electability is a contentious subject but there’s no real debate as to the issues on which this contest is being fought. Between 20 and 25 July, the Conservative Women’s Organisation ran a survey of its members and more than 500 replied, with one in four declaring themselves undecided on their preferred candidate. But what was clear was the issues most important to them: 87 per cent said economy and jobs with 81 per cent going for cost of living and fuel duty. Defence and foreign policy were next most important, followed by crime, policing education and health.

Plenty to discuss then for both candidates as they shake hands and make small talk over the next few crucial weeks…