Can Rishi Beat Race To Become PM?

Will Empire strike back to prevent a game changing election result, asks T P Sreenivasan.

The first BBC debate between the two frontrunners for the Tory leadership, Rishi Sunak, former chancellor of the British exchequer, and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss was comprehensive, ranging from taxation and China to Sunak's Saville Row suits to Truss' street earrings.

Truss was not combative about Sunak's expensive dressing habits. She complimented his dress sense and called him well-dressed, thus avoiding any Rishi repartee on the street earrings she has been wearing lately.

Truss reminded everyone of Angela Merkel's reaction to criticism of the then German chancellor's clothes. Merkel had said she was the chancellor and not a fashion model.

But on everything else at the first debate, there was so much disagreement that it was hard to believe that Sunak and Truss belonged to the same party.

Conservative party leader Johny Mercer did not favour either candidate and remarked that, with either of them as prime minister, the Tories would be out of power soon.

'The puerile nature of the leadership contest is embarrassing. Time to raise standards,' Mercer stated.

As for the Labour Party, both candidates are part of the problem and can be beaten at the next election on the issue of economic growth.

After the first BBC debate, a snap poll showed that Sunak and Truss were neck and neck, though in an earlier survey among Conservative party MPs, Sunak had a clear lead.

Sunak and Truss are now campaigning for the votes of 160,000 Conservative party members before one of them is elected on September 5.

The key issue in the first debate was taxation, Sunak pledged to cut taxes later while Truss promised to do it as soon as possible after she took over as PM.

On British policy towards China, both agreed that this would be tough, though Sunak promised to close down some of the Confucius Institutes, most of them, he pointed out, were established when Truss was Britain's education secretary.

The candidates vied with each other to point the dangers from China to the UK and the world and Sunak turned out to be more inimical to China than Truss.

They both agreed that China would be the biggest threat to the UK in the future.

It is not clear how much Sunak will push his four policy proposals -- to close all 30 Confucius Institutes in the UK, to build stronger diplomatic security alliances against China, to use MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency, to help British business cooperation, and to examine the case for banning Chinese acquisitions of key British firms including strategically sensitive tech firms.

Truss was no less firm in acknowledging the threat from China, but she appeared defensive because of her past record.

Sunak and Truss also debated what they would do to stand up to Vladimir Putin if he turned off the gas supply to Europe this winter.

Sunak asserted that a year-and-a-half ago he oversaw the biggest armed forces uplift since the end of the Cold War.

'It does require toughness to stand up to him and it does require all of us to go through difficult times. Part of us standing up to Putin is realising as a country what's that going to do to our energy bills and having the resolve to get through that. There's lots of different ways we can stand up to him... we certainly will under my leadership,' Sunak said.

Truss said the price of food is a 'huge issue and this is a global crisis. We know it's being exacerbated by the crisis in Ukraine, fertiliser is more expensive, grain is more expensive, that is feeding through to the costs farmers are having to pay. And one thing I would do is reduce the red tape... but it's also important we are resilient and we have a good food supply in the face of these global shocks and we're not solely dependent, particularly on countries we can't trust.'

There are some more debates and interviews to come and these issues will appear in different forms, depending on the audiences they encounter.

But behind this particular election, race may be an important factor no one wants to discuss.

Sunak is British, but his colour may well become a factor against him.

If Sunak becomes the United Kingdom's prime minister, it will be a tectonic shift in British politics as he will be the first PM of Indian origin.

Since the race between Sunak and Truss is very close, observers, particularly in India, are holding their breath to see if the British people -- 160,000 Conservative party voters, that is or about 0.3% of the total UK electorate -- are mature enough to allow such a thing to happen.

Although revenge against colonialism or racial prejudice is not in the minds of the contenders, the question whether the Empire will strike back to prevent a game changing election result is being whispered everywhere.

T P Sreenivasan, (IFS 1967), is a former Ambassador of India and Governor for India of the IAEA.
Ambassador Sreenivasan is a frequent contributor to Rediff.com and you can read his earlier columns here.