UK's new leader: Statesmanship required to achieve Global Britain

"A week is a long time in politics", said Britain's former Prime minister, Harold Wilson, and his successor, Boris Johnson, can now see why. Although he survived the "Partygate" scandal, involving illegal drinking parties at 10 Downing Street during lockdown, he was toppled within days by a sex scandal.

After one of his ministers, Chris Pincher, drunkenly groped two men at the Carlton Club in London's Mayfair district on June 30, Johnson's judgment in appointing him was condemned, just as his explanations were ridiculed.

Amid mass resignations from the government, his Conservative Party members of parliament (MP's) rebelled, making clear they had lost faith in him, and this triggered his resignation as party leader on July 7.

The same MPs then had to choose two candidates for the party leadership for consideration by the Conservative Party's members in the country, of whom there are over 160,000. Once the membership has chosen the party's new leader, he or she will be sworn in as Prime Minister on September 5, when Johnson will formally resign.

Of the three candidates who made it to the final ballot on July 21, the ex-chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, secured the backing of 137 MPs, with the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, obtaining 113, while the Trade Minister, Penny Mordaunt, garnered 105, and was eliminated from the contest.

It is, of course, significant that the Conservative MPs put Sunak in first place, as they work with the candidates day in and day out, and understand better than anybody their strengths and weaknesses. They clearly consider he is the best of the bunch, and it is not hard to see why. He has always been competent and professional, with a principled approach to the issues of the day.

Thus, despite having successfully directed the government's financial response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic impact, he resigned on July 5, on a point of honor, once Johnson's position became untenable.

Although Sunak, who previously worked for Goldman Sachs, only became an MP in 2015, with the support of the then-Prime Minister, David Cameron, he was promoted to Johnson's cabinet in 2019, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) in 2020.

The first big test of his mettle came almost immediately, during the Brexit debates in 2016, when he was reportedly told that, if he defied Cameron and backed Brexit, his political career would be over before it had even begun.

To his credit, he refused to buckle, explaining that "this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for our country to take back control of its destiny," and that the UK would be "freer, fairer and more prosperous outside the European Union".

By contrast, Liz Truss, who, to curry favor with her party's hard right, now flaunts herself as an arch-Brexiteer, voted in favor of the UK remaining in the EU in 2016. Although it has been suggested that Truss, a former accountant, was a covert Eurosceptic all along, and did not want to upset Cameron, who brought her into his cabinet in 2014, her words speak for themselves. On February 20, 2016, she announced "I am backing remain as I believe it is in Britain's economic interest and means we can focus on vital economic and social reform at home".

This was unequivocal, and her subsequent conversion to Brexit smacks not only of political convenience, but also of unabashed careerism.

Her stance, however, paid dividends, and, once Theresa May, another Remainer, succeeded Cameron as Prime Minister, on July 13, 2016, Truss was appointed Secretary for Justice and Lord Chancellor, the first female to hold these posts. Sunak, meanwhile, had to wait until 2018 before May finally made him a junior minister, although, unlike Truss, he quickly distinguished himself.

In her new role, one of Truss' responsibilities was to safeguard the interests of the Judiciary, but, when the media accused the appeal judges of being "enemies of the people" over a Brexit judgment it disliked in 2016, Truss failed to spring to their defense, which they still resent.

As the former Chief Justice, Lord (Igor) Judge, has explained, Truss' "failure to come to the defense of the Judiciary for nearly 48 hours – and her lukewarm response when she did – means if she were taken to court, she would likely be found to have acted unlawfully". There were no tears when, after less than a year in office, Truss was moved to other duties.

It has, moreover, now emerged that Truss, while a student, was the president of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats. At the party's annual conference, she even backed calls for the abolition of the monarchy, something anathema to most Britons.

However, she soon realized there was little chance of furthering her political career within a minority party, and, when she graduated, she switched allegiance to the Conservative Party, a foretaste of her Brexit flip-flopping.

One defining difference between Sunak and Truss concerns competence. Whereas Sunak is clearly the brighter of the two, he is regarded by those who know him best as "a safe pair of hands". By contrast, Truss is a political lightweight, whose missteps are legendary.

When, for example, she visited Moscow in February, she told the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, to the British Ambassador's horror, that the UK would never recognize the Rostov and Voronezh regions as Russian, unaware that they are integral parts of the Russian Federation.

It beggared belief that an ingenue like this should have been representing British interests abroad, and her claim to have misheard the question fooled nobody. Once, moreover, she was back in the UK, she again put her foot in it.

When asked by the BBC if Britons could go to fight in Ukraine, she replied "Absolutely, if that's what they want to do", even though it is illegal for a Briton to take up arms in these circumstances.

Quite clearly, Truss is unsuited for high office, and her election would inevitably make it easier for a rejuvenated Labor Party, led by its increasingly credible leader, Keir Starmer, to reclaim power at the general election, scheduled for 2024.

In order, however, to burnish her credentials, Truss, to general derision, has taken to aping Britain's first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, even reprising her iconic battle tank pose. Yet it is Sunak who epitomizes the Thatcherite ethic, or what he calls "commonsense Thatcherism".