Tories battle to captain sinking ship
Posted by admin978 on July 20, 2022 · Leave a Comment
Today the semi-comic, semi-tragic contest for leadership of the once mighty Conservative & Unionist Party was reduced to two candidates, who will make their pitch to Tory members during the coming weeks.
This is the party that has been in government for 47 of the 77 years since the Second World War, but viewers cringed at the poor quality of televised “debates” between the contenders – in an election that is only happening because the present Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to take responsibility for the sexual incontinence of his Deputy Chief Whip.
Party members must now choose between:
Rishi Sunak, son of wealthy Indian immigrants who left East Africa in the 1960s; entered politics after working for investment bank Goldman Sachs and a couple of “hedge funds”; married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire – Mrs Sunak has non-domiciled tax status allowing her to avoid around £20 million in UK taxes;
and
Liz Truss, a former president of Oxford University Liberal Democrats who saw that the Conservatives offered more chance of a parliamentary career; supported the ultra-woke Tory leader David Cameron who saved her career after a scandal in her private life; supported the “Remain” cause in the Brexit referendum, until Cameron was defeated and Truss reinvented herself as a Brexiteer and “right-winger”.
Sunak was Chancellor of the Exchequer until resigning this month to launch his campaign to replace Johnson. Truss has been Foreign Secretary since last September.
Both Sunak and Truss are courting their former leadership rival Tom Tugendhat, who is likely to be offered a senior post in the next Cabinet, probably as Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary.
Today H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton published an investigation of Tugendhat’s strange family history in an article for the Real History blog: his grandfather Dr Georg Tugendhat was investigated for decades by MI5. Georg Tugendhat had close connections to international financial criminals and suspected spies, and his business partners included the first President of Israel and the founder of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme.
One very odd aspect of the leadership election was that when Tugendhat was eliminated, his votes did not transfer wholesale to Penny Mordaunt, who on most issues was closer to Tugendhat than any of the other remaining contenders.
A clue as to why Tugendhat’s transfers split as they did – and why Mordaunt’s campaign was eventually derailed – is Monday’s Daily Mail front page, which dug up an old story that Mordaunt had dared to meet with representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain.
This meeting enraged the Zionist lobby. Tugendhat was the most pro-Israel of the leadership candidates, and Mordaunt’s MCB meeting implied that she was not a slavish follower of the Zionist agenda. So because of this one issue (and despite agreeing with Mordaunt on most other key issues) the Tugendhat vote mainly went elsewhere, guaranteeing a Truss v Sunak contest.
