BoJo banished - Liz Truss down. Is Rishi next for the toaster? **threadbans in OP**

If he’s any political sense he’ll avoid Patel. Her ideology and policies are far too divisive and the public has shown that it’s losing its enthusiasm for that kind of politics.

Once the red mist of Brexit faded the economy has become the key focus again and I think you’re seeing genuine, and rapidly growing, concern about declining living standards.

There’s even maybe a realisation that dismantling social services, because the tabloids told them they were for scroungers, actually hurt everyone…

Yep, you're right. She only backed Sunak this morning...very unlikely to get anything...thankfully.

I think there’s an issue though with personality. The Tories are currently ungovernable and the only type of leader the seem to respond to is the public school principal type, who will glower, bully, shout and whip them into line.

Sunak appears to be too nice and lacks that extremely domineering personality that’s required to keep them on the same page.

They basically need a competent, technocratic bully to function and that’s quite an indictment of what the Tories are as an organisation and a political culture.

My prediction is there will be a short honeymoon and then they will continue to split, backstab and rip each other apart as soon as some trigger button issue emerges, or he’s seen as being even slightly sane or pragmatic about anything to do with the EU or immigration etc

Rightly or wrongly, the ERG, quite a few of the utter head bangers and also some of the extreme libertarian elements saw Truss as their champion, so I could still see a possibility of bitterness emerging if they’re perceiving her as being pilloried, which she was and for all the right reasons.

There are just so many possible structural cracks that are possible and likely to emerge.

I just think this could be Theresa May all over again. Someone who was trying, almost certainly with good intentions, to fix the unfixable, probably compromising and deal making against all their instincts.

She ended up attempting to deliver a set of policies that just couldn’t be delivered because her party was so fractured, and she didn’t have the personality to hammer them into line behind her.

Boris’ approach is all bluff, bluster and personality. That ultimately didn’t work either - largely self inflicted though in that case.

I agree, that’s fundamentally why they can’t deliver anything remotely sensible. They’ve a large centre / pragmatic element too but it’s basically been cowed into submission to this fringe element that has more in common with UKIP and even the BNP.

They've reabsorbed a lot of elements that had been pushed out during the 80s and 90s.

There are huge and obvious parallels to the GOP, just with a slightly different array of trigger topics, but it’s the same malaise.

I think if the Tories are to become a sane party again they need a long spell in opposition to do a massive analysis and clean up.

I would like, just from an Irish neighbourly and self interested perspective, to see a sensible and pragmatic centre / centre right emerge in the UK. Whether that’s a new party, or within the Tories is open to debate but unless it happens I think there won’t be a resolution to any of this.

In a de facto two party system, the options for correcting a mess like this are very limited and there’s a huge risk of ‘rinse and repeat’