A great strength of the Lease Trust is its popularity with the Conservative membership. This was seen in the months and years leading up to the July-September 2022 leadership election when he regularly topped the monthly Conservative Home poll of most-liked cabinet ministers.
If there were to be another ballot, and it’s far from certain that would be the case, it’s probably best to assume he would have the same level of support. Last time he got 57.4% votes ahead of Rishi Sunak in the members poll.
We all know that his tenure as Conservative leader and Prime Minister lasted just 44 days and we have seen the biggest run in the pound in recent decades. A significant proportion of the Bank of England’s currency reserves kept sterling stable during the worst of the crisis.
It all came to a head with his speech at the conference in September when he set out a vision for the country that was far from anything we knew before and led to a market panic.
Even with this apparent black mark my guess is that in another Tory contest she will come out on top.
Mike Smithson