Who would replace Boris Johnson? Here are his likely successors

It's been a tumultuous 24 hours in British politics. As resignations piled up, Prime Minister Boris Johnson chose to quit. But who would take over? Bobby Ghosh spoke to Bloomberg Opinion columnists Adrian Wooldridge and Clive Crook on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday afternoon. Here is part of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Bobby Ghosh: Betting shops have the former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt as the joint favourites to be Boris Johnson's successor. Do you think either of them has the ability to bring the Conservative Party together and provide the leadership that Johnson seems unable to?

Adrian Wooldridge: Whoever wins would get a big boost, simply because they're not Boris Johnson and come without the baggage and the reputation for lying.

I think Rishi Sunak is extremely good. He's very bright, personable and well-organised. One of Boris's many problems is that he's a very chaotic administrator, so having somebody in Number 10 who can just keep the trains running on time would be an enormous boost.

However, he's a pretty traditional Thatcherite, which means that he's very uncomfortable with "levelling up," particularly when it involves spending a lot of money. There are a lot of Tories, particularly on the right of the party, who would be very nervous about having a fiscally responsible leader who thinks that the most important thing to do is to put the country's economic situation in order before they start cutting taxes. Plus, by resigning slightly after Health Secretary Sajid Javid, he painted himself as more of a follower than a leader — which is a gibe people already use against him. There is quite a lot of hostility within the party towards Rishi now. Six months ago, he was in the perfect position, but he's fallen a bit since then.

Penny Mordaunt is an extraordinary figure, and I'm slightly surprised that she is so popular because she's not in the Cabinet.

She represents a seat in Portsmouth, which is a long-standing Labour seat, which she's shifted to the Tory column and has built her majority. So she's quite good at representing the sentiments of the White British working class, without being particularly right-wing.

BG:  It's worth mentioning that some of the other contenders are Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, and new Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi.

Clive Crook: They're all plausible candidates. I do think Rishi Sunak is right on the issues and it's a sign of the times to see the right wing of the Tory Party being the anti-Thatcherite wing. The fiscal discipline that Sunak stands for is undeniably going to be necessary as part of this adjustment to post-Covid fiscal control. It's a very difficult message for him to sell. 

I also think he deserves to be commended for what he said in his resignation letter, that people want to be told the truth and he's willing to tell them the truth — whether it will get him the party leadership is another question altogether.

I'm a bit startled to see Penny Mordaunt though. I hadn't thought of her as a policy heavyweight in the way some of the other candidates are.

AW: She's been running a behind-the-scenes campaign for quite a long time and has published a book called Greater Britain, which is an attempt to cast an optimistic eye to the future. So she has been campaigning, but she's not one of the big beasts of the party.

Ben Wallace would probably have quite a good chance because he's sort of a bland, sensible, ex-Army person that people could get behind.

CC: He's more of an old-fashioned Tory in some ways.

BG: To pull the lens back from Britain and take a look at the larger context of Europe and the wider world, how much does it matter who takes over from Boris Johnson?

CC:  Fixing the relationship with Europe is a challenge for the UK, and Johnson has been irresponsible across the board — picking needless fights, reversing himself, threatening escalation in certain quarrels, which he ought to know Britain can't win. 

The UK needs someone who's much more positive about developing a fruitful post-Brexit relationship with the European Union. It's interesting to me that the other leading figures in the party have not been conspicuous on this subject. There's no way to make the best of Brexit without cooperating with the EU, but a narrative along those lines hasn't really emerged yet.

Read the full story at www.tbsnews.net

BG: Why not? Are the potential candidates worried about how that might play with their voters?

AW: Well the basic Conservative vote was a vote against Europe. A lot of Brexiters are very hostile to Europe either because they regard it as a restraint on a truly global trade policy, or because they regard it as just a lot of pernickety regulations. The Conservative Party hasn't got beyond that anti-European mindset.

Again, I would look to somebody like Rishi Sunak, who was a Brexiter but would be much more mature because he's economically literate about what sort of realistic relationship we could have with the EU. 

In comparison, Boris doesn't care about economic policy. He's never thought seriously about how wealth is created or how trade operates.

The one person we haven't focused on yet is the person who, in many ways, is the most likely to replace Johnson: Liz Truss. She's not top of that league table but she's foreign secretary, has been very involved in trade policy and has support among the grassroots of the Conservative Party.

In lots of ways, she's more hardline in her contempt for social democratic European policies and I think she would see herself as a person who had to take a very hard line with Europe, which I think would be very foolish.

BG: Clive, does Liz Truss do it for you in terms of a potential leader?

CC: No, not really. One hesitates to say she might be worse than Johnson — what could be worse? — but in terms of the relationship with Europe, she is very much a hardliner who takes euro-scepticism to a self-destructive extreme. 

I think it would be poisonous for the relationship between the UK and the EU to have her as a leader. Someone like Rishi Sunak is more plausible. He has a more technocratic demeanour, he'd want to do deals and I can't imagine him making grandstanding pro-British,  anti-EU speeches.

Post-Covid, fixing the relationship with Europe is absolutely the most important thing that the UK government needs to do. The evidence of the cost of Brexit continues to mount: It's complicating Britain's efforts to get inflation down, and it's going to complicate efforts to restore fiscal control. 

Brexit is looming in the background of all these big policy issues and getting the relationship back towards some kind of cooperative mode is crucial.

BG: Both of you clearly think Rishi Sunak has it in him to govern in this very difficult moment. Does he have credibility with the party base? Does he have the charisma to lead the party in an election or is that too far out for the party to care about right now?

AW: He has lost some of his credibility with the base over the Partygate fines and his wife's non-dom tax status. Just before that happened, he was clearly the most popular person. But I think he's very personable, he's a technocrat, he's not a chancer in the way that Johnson is. 

He negates all of Johnson's bad features. He's MP for a constituency in North Yorkshire. His parents were also immigrants who have made their own way in the world, which gives him an appeal to the immigrant community, which is quite an important swing vote in the UK.

He also has the ability to appeal to the technocratic elites in Europe and the United States at a time when we need to have some credibility with the financial world because the UK economy is very shaky.

Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He writes on foreign affairs, with a special focus on the Middle East and Africa.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.