Conservative MPs open the way for a summer of bitter infighting

The fear for Rishi Sunak will be that this is as good as it gets: he finished ahead of his rivals, but with the support of just 137 MPs. Pretty much every poll and survey of the Conservative party membership suggests he will be defeated by Liz Truss, the foreign secretary.

Despite his undoubted gifts as a communicator, the former chancellor is in the unlovely political position of having all the drawbacks of being associated with Boris Johnson’s government and none of the benefits. He faces a long and painful summer of being attacked for his tax-raising budgets and the government’s economic record, while knowing that Johnson’s allies in parliament and the press are out to get him.

For Truss, who took five rounds to finally secure second-place — having trailed Penny Mordaunt for most of the contest and struggled to convince the party’s rightwingers to rally behind her — this will feel like a victory. Having spent the last fortnight fighting to get out ahead in the large field of candidates competing with her on the right of the party, she has emerged as the woman with the golden ticket: the right to compete with Sunak for the votes of party members, which the bookmakers believe she will win.

That reality is, in part, a reflection on how strange the modern Tory party has become. Sunak is no moderate and he is a committed Brexiter, who first wrote an essay railing against the European Union at the age of 16. Truss is a former protégé of George Osborne who campaigned to remain in 2016. Yet it is Sunak who is badly trailing among Tory members and who is dogged by accusations that his time at the Treasury was the second coming of Gordon Brown.

Sunak’s allies believe that his anti-EU credentials can be put to good use in attacking Truss: his campaign produced a video explicitly comparing his pro-Brexit campaigning with Truss’ Remain vote, and he used the televised debate to ask the foreign secretary which she was more ashamed of: her teenage membership of the Liberal Democrats or her support for the EU.

As for Truss, her formal campaign will be able to eschew direct attacks on Sunak, in part because she will know that Johnson’s closest allies will be keen to do that for her.

Team Sunak are surely right to believe that a scorched earth approach is their best way to win. Given the significant disagreements between the two over economic policy, it is highly unlikely that there will be a place in the Cabinet for the loser, which means neither candidate has much reason to hold back.

The fear for Tory MPs of all types is that today’s vote will mean a summer of vicious blue-on-blue fighting. The bitter exchanges between Sunak and Truss in the second televised debate have already formed the basis of one slick and well-edited Labour attack advert. The opposition may have the material for a feature film before the summer is over.

stephen.bush@ft.com