MADRID, 21 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The race to succeed British Prime Minister Liz Truss has gotten off to a quiet start. None of the potential candidates has taken a step forward for now, nor has former Prime Minister Boris Johnson clarified his true intentions, whom some of his colleagues are already openly asking to return.
Johnson announced his resignation in July, besieged by a chain of controversies and scandals that ended up questioning his reliability as a leader. He left office in September, but a poll published this week by the YouGov firm kept him as the favorite of Conservative Party supporters.
This poll, which hypothesized Truss would resign, placed Johnson with a support level of 32 percent, ahead of former Finance Minister Rishi Sunak (23 percent), Defense Minister Ben Wallace (10 percent cent), and the ‘tory’ leader in the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt.
Johnson is silent — he is on vacation in the Caribbean — and, officially, has never commented on his possible return. The deputy Nadine Dorries, considered a close ally of the former president, has assured that she is preparing to try to return to the front line, according to the BBC.
Other lawmakers, on the other hand, make it clear they don’t want any surprise comebacks. “We have to leave Boris Johnson’s psychodrama behind,” Crispin Blunt, also a deputy, and Sunak’s supporter, have claimed in statements to public radio and television.
The Conservative Party has set itself the goal of resolving the succession of Truss in a week and the first step for the applicants will be to obtain the endorsement of at least one hundred deputies. The threshold is considerably higher than the 20 endorsements required to replace Johnson this year and he is called to establish a first filter.
Among those who do seem to enjoy broad support in the House of Commons is Sunak, second in the last ‘Tory’ primaries and a constant object of speculation. In fact, sources quoted by ‘The Times’ warned last week of an alleged plot in the shadows to elevate Sunak and Mordaunt in a kind of double leadership and consensus, in which both shared the leadership of the Government and the party .
Unlike Sunak, Mordaunt, who also appeared in the last primary process, has remained with Truss in his brief six weeks of mandate. In fact, he has sat next to her in the House of Commons at key moments, such as when the prime minister was forced to justify economic transfers in the face of the siege of the opposition and part of her own caucus.
Some deputies have also spoken in favor of the entry into the fray of the Defense Minister, who has not revealed any intention for now, and of Suella Braverman, who resigned as head of the Interior less than 24 hours before Truss announced to Downing Street your exit.
Braverman attributed his resignation to an error in the dissemination of official information, but in his farewell statement he left several messages to Truss on account of the need to accept his mistakes. On Sky News, the former minister has stated that she will make a statement “in due course”.