Former UK Chancellor and possible British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s campaign team thinks his early comments about California’s Silicon Valley may have hurt his chances of becoming Conservative Party leader.
According to sources cited by “The Daily Telegraph,” the Ready4Rishi campaign team thought things were not going well when Sunak mentioned California three times in less than 10 minutes.
When asked what job he would choose as a young graduate, the British-Indian former minister thought about the “culture” of entrepreneurship he saw while living on the West Coast of the US from 2004 to 2006. He was talking on stage at one of the early hustings in Eastbourne on August 5 to get Tory members to choose between Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.
“It really makes me feel good and gives me hope. If I were young, I would want to go do something like that “he said.
The people who worked at his campaign office in central London thought that more than twice as many grassroots Conservatives supported Truss and that his focus on California showed that he was out of touch.
“People started to say that it wasn’t going to happen today and that he wasn’t connecting with voters in the room,” a campaign source told the publication.
He talked about technology and California a lot. During the campaign, it became clear to almost everyone that he wouldn’t win. The source said that when people started to realise that, things really started to change at those hustings.
As the campaign spread to the rest of the Tory party, Sunak’s supposed “blockbuster effect,” which made him the most popular among his fellow lawmakers at first, started to fade. Today, he is more than 30 points behind in the polls, and most people think he will lose.
MPs who talked to “The Telegraph” say that his decision on July 27 to promise a cut in the VAT on energy bills, just weeks after ruling it out as Chancellor, shows that he didn’t give Tory members a clear message at the start of the campaign.
People saw this as a U-turn, which showed that Sunak wasn’t serious about keeping his promise to be a fiscal hawk despite the rising cost of living.
He said, “I have, lo and behold, said that the time is right. His whole campaign was based on the idea that tax cuts should be put off until the right time. God, what in the world are you thinking? One politician told the paper, “No one can have their cake and eat it too.
The article talks about how Sunak gets around in a car instead of a helicopter like his opponent, Liz Truss.
A recent picture showed Sunak sleeping with his head on his backpack as he went from one event to the next. Sunak, who likes sweet things, is often seen by his crew munching on a bag of chocolate bits.
Even though he appeals to the average person, the self-described internet enthusiast has been called “addicted to Twitter.” He has also failed to win over the Conservative Party’s large base of mostly older supporters.
A Sunak-supporting MP said that his team’s policy ideas for the campaign were the “worst of all possible worlds” and “played to the tired idea of what membership is.”
Loyalists don’t agree with the way surveys are done because they always show Truss more than 30 points ahead. They also point out that only about 65% of people are expected to vote. Also, rising energy costs have become the main focus of the campaign, which may back up what the outgoing Chancellor did to help homes in specific ways.
One of Sunak’s supporters said, “The energy price issue is so important that what was talked about earlier in the campaign doesn’t really matter now.”
