Will the Tory truce hold?

During the summer leadership race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, Sunak’s team were braced for a bloodbath if he won. It would have required a major polling error and gone down as one of the biggest political upsets in recent years. ‘If we win, we win by 1 per cent,’ was how one close ally of Sunak put it at the time.

If this had played out, it would have come as a nasty surprise to many in the Tory party. With wounds still raw from Boris Johnson’s departure, the deposed former PM’s loyalists would have quickly gone on the offensive – accusing Sunak of being a traitor for resigning in Johnson’s dying days. Supporters of Truss, meanwhile, would have claimed the tiny win meant that he didn’t have a mandate for his fiscal plan and pushed instead for immediate tax cuts. The prospect of these rebels in the event of a slim Sunak victory was so bad that it led some MPs in the middle of the party to vote for Truss.