VICTORY FOR THE LETTUCE as the independence movement asks itself: are we #ReadyForRishi?

Rather embarrassingly, at one particular stage in the last Tory leadership election (you know, long long ago before The Truss Era even started) I said that I was pretty convinced Penny Mordaunt was going to win. So maybe I should be more circumspect this time, but all the logic at this early stage does seem to point to Rishi Sunak. If it was another members’ ballot, Boris Johnson’s comeback dream might be on, or if there was a members’ ballot without Johnson, Penny Mordaunt might have a decent chance of beating Sunak. But with only MPs voting, Sunak is firmly in pole position – he topped all the MPs’ ballots in the summer, and even in losing the eventual vote, he “won” the economic arguments.

I thought Christmas had come early for the independence movement in July when Truss emerged as the frontrunner, because it seemed almost too good to be true that we’d have another asset in Downing Street who was almost as valuable as Boris himself. But I did add the caveat that if Truss became unpopular in England too, that could be a major problem for us by giving momentum to Labour. I could never have foreseen that she would prove to be literally the worst Prime Minister in the entirety of British history, and that Labour would rack up a thirty-point GB-wide lead within two or three weeks. In retrospect it seems obvious that a Sunak victory would have left us with better prospects in a plebiscite election. OK, we’re now possibly going to have Sunak anyway, but is the damage already done for the Tories? Are they toast no matter who they choose?

The Tory brand is so tarnished now that I can’t see any new leader overtaking Labour in the polls. The most that might happen is that the next general election will start to look competitive again. So the question we may have to ask ourselves is: would we actually be better off with a Labour government looking like a foregone conclusion? I wonder if a tight election might be the worst of all worlds, because it would give Labour the ideal opportunity to scare Scottish voters into thinking they “must” vote Labour to avoid Tory rule.

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The lettuce is victorious. pic.twitter.com/azUSdkYTbN

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) October 20, 2022

HUGE day for George Canning.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 20, 2022

When the Prime Minister resigned in 1990, it was like the whole world had stopped. Nowadays you just shrug and think “well it’s Thursday, right enough”.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 20, 2022

It turns out that the Liberal Democrats’ sleeper agents are just as rubbish as the rest of the party.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 20, 2022