British PM rivals stage first clash in front of Tory members

British Conservatives Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss started their first barbecue in front of party members on Thursday as they fought a bitter duel to succeed Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The Hustings in Leeds, northern England, was the opening battle of 12 grassroots nationwide events at which members elected a new leader after a cabinet revolt forced scandal-hit Johnson to resign.

The result will be announced on September 5 and Truss has carved out a strong lead in polls of Tory members after promising immediate tax cuts as Britain faces a slump in living standards.

Former Treasury Secretary Sunak has denounced Truss’s “fairytale economy” and vowed to first tame rising inflation, but has admitted he is the “underdog” to the foreign minister.

On foreign policy, both rivals have vowed to expand Johnson’s staunch support for Ukraine and to oppose China’s increasingly authoritarian rise while capitalizing on the vaguely defined “Brexit opportunities”.

Their two previously televised head-to-head debates have been contradictory – although the second was abruptly cut short on Tuesday when the TalkTV host fainted live on air.

In Leeds, candidates for the two-hour hustings were allocated seats close together, rather than facing lecterns from opposite ends of a television studio.

Tory members in attendance applauded co-leader Andrew Stephenson as he noted their party was ready to appoint Britain’s third female prime minister, or first black woman.

Sunak joked that he got a “great tan” after criss-crossing the Leeds region this week in rarely sunny weather.

Truss attended high school in an affluent suburb of Leeds, while Sunak is based in Westminster, about an hour’s drive north in the same county of Yorkshire.

Truss said her upbringing in Yorkshire gave her “courage, determination and openness”.

“And that, my friends, is what we need at Downing Street now,” she told the hustings audience.

However, Truss has also accused her Leeds school of encouraging “low expectations” in her pupils, provoking anger from teachers and those around her.

Despite the school’s obvious shortcomings, she, like Sunak, went to the University of Oxford.

Both candidates have pledged their support for Johnson’s “leveling up” agenda to revitalize growth in neglected regions of the UK, including around Leeds.

Before the hustings, Truss backed a rail investment project to ‘boost’ investment in northern England after Johnson and Sunak’s Treasury scaled it back on cost grounds.

“The thing about me is that I’m willing to take on Whitehall orthodoxy, I’m willing to challenge the groupthink that hasn’t invested enough in this part of the country for decades,” she said.

However, Truss declined to commit to restoring a separate high-speed link to Leeds, which was being scrapped as part of a mammoth project currently under construction to build new express lines from London.

Referring to the UK cost-of-living crisis, Sunak has reversed his previous opposition to increasing tax breaks on household energy bills, which are set to spike again in October.

“I’m going to get inflation under control and bring it down again,” he said at the hustings, promising tax cuts going forward.