Rishi Sunak was supposed to be the slick storyteller but polls show Liz Truss has schooled him 🔵 'Voters have to be won over with a story that resonates with their emotions' ✍️ John Curtice for ipaperviews
Narrative is central to the art of politics. The successful politician tells a story about themselves and where they would like to take the country that voters can comprehend and find attractive – even though it may not always pass critical scrutiny. It is an art of which Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, and, indeed, Boris Johnson, were masters.
One key component of Truss’ narrative has been to sell herself as the ordinary girl who grew up in unfashionable Paisley and Leeds – in contrast to her opponent,and who once claimed not to have any working-class friends. In practice, Truss was brought up in both places in affluent neighbourhoods, while her father was a Professor of Mathematics. However, the story has stuck. According to YouGov, no less than 74 per cent of Tory members think that, and only 11 per cent Sunak.
Meanwhile, Truss’s calls for tax cuts has set much of the agenda for the leadership debate, enabled her to sing a traditional Tory tune that, and put Sunak, who found himself as Chancellor presiding over record levels of taxation and spending, on the defensive. True, some weeks into the campaign it has finally emerged that her tax cuts are unlikely to do much to achieve their supposed purpose of alleviating the cost of living crisis.
Truss has also captured the zeitgeist among Tory members that while a majority of them had eventually come to the conclusion that perhaps Johnson had to go, the manner of his downfall upset many of them. The Foreign Secretary acknowledges the Prime Minister’s mistakes, but still suggests that they were outweighed by his successes such as Brexit and the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, thereby indicating her continued loyalty to the “ancien regime”.
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