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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Good morning. Rishi Sunak is facing an attack on his leadership from the usual suspects. The attack is a bit of a nonsense, but it reveals an important dynamic going into the election, so some thoughts on that below.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
Tele trouble
The Telegraph has run a no-holds-barred attack on Rishi Sunak. It includes an op-ed from Truss-era cabinet minister Simon Clarke calling on him to go and an opinion poll showing that a hypothetical Conservative leader would do better against Keir Starmer than him.
The latter piece is revealing largely because of what it tells us about the Telegraph’s relationship with Sunak in an election year. This is a story that has been puffed up and boosted to cause maximum damage to the prime minister.
Clarke was made chief secretary to the Treasury by Boris Johnson in part because he was Johnson’s man not Sunak’s. Clarke campaigned for and backed Liz Truss over Sunak in the 2022 Conservative party leadership contest. But in the story he is described as Sunak’s “former cabinet ally”. The attached opinion poll showing the wisdom of replacing the prime minister is similarly overblown.
While the polling shows Starmer beating Sunak on the question of which of the two men voters prefer for prime minister, the Labour leader falls behind in a head-to-head with an imagined “new Tory leader”. The survey did not present respondents with names of possible alternative Tory leaders, but asked who they would prefer: Starmer or a hypothetical Conservative candidate who meets the following description:
Stronger on crime and migration, who cut taxes and got NHS waiting lists down.
I mean, really, why stop there? If you’re going to poll Starmer’s performance against a Conservative leader who improves public services, cuts taxes and lowers immigration, why not go the whole hog and ask how voters would act if Starmer faced a Conservative prime minister who cured cancer, resolved my long-running dispute with Wickes over my bathroom renovation, gave everyone in the UK a million pounds tax-free and scored the winning goal in the World Cup final? Of course Sunak does worse against Starmer than an imagined, perfect ideal of a Conservative prime minister.
What’s really revealing here though is that the Telegraph, the house newspaper of the Tory party, is not on side with the prime minister in an election year. It is willing to make trouble for him and to undermine him. That is going to be a running sore for Sunak all the way until the election. Although there is no serious prospect that the prime minister will be forced out by his party, there is a real chance that he will be badly wounded by it.
Now try this
I unexpectedly ended up having to watch the children’s TV show Bluey yesterday. It really is very good, and I enjoyed Nic Fildes’ piece on the business story behind it, especially now that I have some idea what the show is about.
