Insiders Admit Race to Be Next U.K. Prime Minister Is Headed for ‘Five-Star

The race to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader and therefore prime minister has fast turned into a Rorschach test designed to discover all the different ways Britain’s conservatives are miserable.

In Rishi Sunak, the former finance minister, Conservative party members see a man who was disloyal to Johnson by leading the exodus of cabinet officials which ultimately led to Johnson’s downfall earlier this month. Worse, they see him as being disloyal to the very principles of what it means to be a Conservative. In Liz Truss, the incumbent foreign minister, they see a decaf Margaret Thatcher who will do anything to attain power.

The polls suggest either of them would lose the next general election.

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Britain’s ruling party arrived at this sorry ultimatum when Boris Johnson inadvertently fired the starting gun on a new leadership race when he shot himself in the foot over the latest sexual assault scandal to dog the party. His mishandling gave Johnson’s Conservative colleagues the perfect excuse to tell him he had to go for decency’s sake, claiming their sudden loss of patience with him had nothing at all to do with damning recent election results, which showed that their party could be on its way to the opposition benches in Westminster if he was still in charge at the next general election.

Johnson became the latest victim of a time-honored Tory tradition: bringing down their own leader while in government. Now the United Kingdom will need a new prime minister. You might think such a vital democratic question would be answered by the British people at a general election, but no. Instead, for the third time since 2016, it will be down to an estimated 200,000 card-carrying members of the Conservative Party to decide who gets unchecked power to rule over the U.K.’s 67 million people.

Tory members of parliament (MPs) have already whittled down an initial field of nine potential leaders to just two. Sunak and Truss will now hit the road, campaigning around the country and taking part in TV debates before one is crowned leader on September 5.

The squabbling between the wider pool of candidates in the early debates was so bad that party elders canceled the final debate so that the rest of the country couldn’t see the Tories tearing themselves apart and trashing their record in power live on TV. There are hopes—but no guarantees—that the head-to-head version will produce fewer fireworks.

The trouble is, most Conservative lawmakers and party members are far from thrilled about the final two, or even the way the candidates were chosen.

“This particular contest has been nasty, vicious, personal, and nothing to do with policies,” says John Strafford, chairman of the Campaign for Conservative Democracy, a grassroots organization which aims to make the party more democratic. “Policies have been pushed aside so all of these personal ego-trips that the MPs are riding on have come to the fore. It’s an absolute disgrace. It’s a travesty of democracy.” The 80-year-old party veteran—who’s been a Tory member since 1964—says he wouldn’t vote for either Truss or Sunak. But he has no love lost for Johnson, who Strafford considers “the worst Conservative leader of my lifetime.”

Just a few short months ago, mega-bucks Sunak was a national hate-figure. His support in the polls plummeted when it emerged that he had held a U.S. green card—essentially declaring himself a permanent resident in America for tax reasons—even while in office as Britain’s finance minister and, er, raising everyone else’s taxes. It also came out that his wife came out that his wife—who has an estimated $835 million stake in her billionaire father’s company—claimed a special tax status for British residents whose permanent home is overseas.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/No. 10

And Truss is certainly not without her downsides. She’s seen in some parts of the party and the public as being insubstantial, and has racked up her own self-sabotaging embarrassments. In January, she had to admit spending an indefensible $600,000 of public money on a private jet trip to Australia. And she’s also been repeatedly called out for deliberately trying to emulate Tory hero Margaret Thatcher in an unseemly, years-long campaign of photo ops. (Mind you, images of Sunak have also generated shock—it’s hard to fathom how short he really is—5ft6—until you see him standing next to another human being.)

A video of Truss making a fist-bitingly cringeworthy speech at the 2014 party convention has also gone endlessly viral during the leadership campaign. “Truss knows nothing about economics,” one former Conservative minister told The Daily Beast. “She’s completely wacky…