So it’s Sunak v Truss, the ‘blue-on-blue dogfight’. The Westminster papers are already drooling over that prospect. Like a dog with a new bone, they’ve all dropped the weather issue. There’s nothing about the fires ‘created’ by that two-day heatwave, nothing about the A&E departments not coping, nothing about all the other horrors we were clobbered with. Ah well, that two-day heatwave did help support the ‘firm resolve’ of all concerned not to touch Net Zero.

And so to our future, the future of our country which is now in the hands of Tory Party members voting for Sunak or Truss. The final tally was Sunak -137; Truss -113; Mordaunt – 105. This morning the MSM have discerned that Miz T has a slight advantage (link). Well, of course she has because she’s in full-on ‘stomp on everybody’ mode. Ms PM4PM has complained repeatedly that Liz and her allies were using dirty tricks. I’ve lost the link but there was a snippet that Mr Simon Case, the Whitehall Mandarin of Mandarins, was instituting a leak enquiry into how information used to smear Ms M got into the MSM’s hands. 

Now the Truss ‘allies’ are going to do the same to Sunak, as The Times reports under the elegant (not!) headline “Liz Truss the human hand grenade relies on allies to attack Rishi Sunak” (link, paywalled). Clever, isn’t it: it’s ‘allies’ who do it, La Truss has plausible deniability. The first paragraph in that report demonstrates that we’re in for  something worse than a dogfight. It’s going to be a full-on ‘war on Sunak’:

“Liz Truss’s allies will launch personal attacks on Rishi Sunak for raising taxes and “betraying” Boris Johnson as part of their bid to win over Tory members. The foreign secretary will not engage in personal criticism of Sunak, instead presenting herself as a “change” candidate who will cut £30 billion worth of taxes as she “goes for growth”. ” (link, paywalled)

Promising “jam tomorrow”, e.g. tax cuts, never fails. It always works. Note also that she is going to try and look to be the Johnson Continuity Candidate. That is indeed an advantage given that BJ has threatened a comeback in yesterday’s last Prime Minister’s Questions’.  Some of her allies are out in the open now and these are indeed ‘Big Beasts’. To the Truss support from Lord Frost add Iain Duncan Smith, JRM, Nadine Dorries and ‘allies’ yet remaining in the shadows. One other Big Beast who has now got off the fence is Sir John Redwood who wrote yesterday:

“I am delighted Liz Truss will be in the final with Rishi Sunak. I want a change of economic policy as readers of this site will know. Liz Truss will give us that change. Rishi has accepted Treasury and Bank advice which has given us a high inflation and if unaltered will give us a recession next year. We can  do better.” (link)

Does Sir JR really believe that Liz and the Treasury will change anything once she’s in No 10? Surely he must know that she’s an economic ignoramus who is bleating about Tax reductions without telling us how she’ll pay for the inflation-driven pay rises in the public Sector, the NHS while increasing spending on the Armed Forces. Back to Miz T and her allies, strategising on how to get her into No 10. They are expected:

“[…] to directly challenge Sunak over his record in government and for bringing down the prime minister. “The guns are going to be out for Rishi now,” an ally said. “A lot of people have been holding back. While he was chancellor the Treasury became a black hole for policies that die. They don’t call Liz the human hand grenade for nothing.” The attacks from Truss’s team will focus on inflation, tax rises and disloyalty.“ (link, paywalled)

Again, that’s clever! Never mind that, since times immemorial, the Treasury has always been a ‘black hole’ for policies. It’s also clever to play up the ‘loyalty issue’ because we all know that the candidate perceived as the knife-wielder is regarded as heinous knave in the Tory Party and not worthy of their votes. This is how it’s going to be done:

“Rishi is the continuity candidate, he’s going to have to defend his record in government and his point blank refusal to reduce taxes,” an ally of Truss said. “He signed off on quantitative easing last year when lots of economists were saying it was a big mistake. “The grassroots are still very angry about his betrayal of Boris, particularly in the north.” (link, paywalled)

Did Miz T and all her supporters who were in the Johnson Cabinet say a word about the Sunak taxes at the time? I seem to have missed that … Painting Sunak as ‘continuity candidate’ diverts from the fact that it’s actually La T who is ‘it’. Team Rishi on the other hand is apparently playing a gentleman’s game, having been “ordered to refrain from personal attacks on Truss, with MPs who break the rule getting admonitory phone calls from campaign HQ.” (link, paywalled).

You can read all about the ‘Truss Programme’ in the DM’s lead article (link) where every imaginary ‘populist’ button is being pressed, from taxes to ‘values’ to ‘taking on Whitehall’ Good luck with that one, Liz! Mind you – given her track record of being a nice face for the policies the mandarins wanted to implement it’s obvious to me that this ‘Whitehall’ point in her manifesto is just hot air and won’t happen. 

Speaking of Whitehall: I expect that the mandarins who’ve been using her as nice face to promote their policies will work en coulisse as her shadowy allies, providing gossip and spin to support her campaign. It’s in their interest to have her in No 10 because they know that she’ll do as she’s told. Btw, her ‘manifesto’ is published by the DM – just scroll down a bit at the link above – and yes, we read that she’ll ‘stand up to Putin’. What we don’t find in all her tax-cutting waffle is any mention at all about Net Zero and green taxes. That makes her tax-cutting siren calls implausible. 

Meanwhile, Sunak is becoming the punchbag for all Trussites. There’s one piece in The Times with an intriguing headline: “​‘Sunak doesn’t excite members but voters think Truss is weird’ (link, paywalled) – interesting because ‘voters’, i.e. us plebs out here in the sticks are not involved with deciding who will come out on top. I expect a ton of Sunak-supporting stuff in the next days.

We’re in for a ‘hot’ summer – not because of the weather but because of the blue-on-blue war. There will be dirty tricks and dirty linen washed in public, there will be promises which won’t be kept. After much blood on the floor we’ll either have a wannabe Mrs Thatcher without her principles or a wannabe Macron as next PM. We’ll have a shadowy government by Whitehall mandarins or one by even more shadowy globalists. What a choice!

The outlook for our country has just become worse than only grim.