Time is running out for Rishi Sunak and his struggling leadership campaign

theguardian.com:

Rishi Sunak and failure have previously been strangers. Head boy at Winchester, one of England’s grandest private schools. A first in PPE at Oxford, nursery of so many Tory prime ministers, and a Fulbright scholar at Stanford. He talked his way into one of the safest Conservative seats in the country at the age of 34 and was chancellor before he turned 40.

David Cameron once dubbed him “the future of our party” and ascending to Number 10 must have seemed the inevitable next episode of an irresistible story of upward mobility from the suburbs of Southampton to the pinnacle of power.

Unfortunately for him, this chapter is being written by Tory members and it doesn’t look as though they will make it a happy one. The polling suggests that the majority want not him as their next leader, but Liz Truss. The Trussites are becoming so confident that some of them are risking sounding complacent and arrogant by suggesting that Mr Sunak ought to quit now before he falls even further behind. He is showing signs of being rattled, such as his abrupt conversion to suspending VAT on energy bills, an idea he previously dismissed on the correct grounds that this is not the way to direct help to those who most need it because a VAT cut will be of greatest benefit to affluent households.

It is too early to definitively write off his bid for the leadership – an extraordinary event or revelation could still upend things – but we can draft a preliminary postmortem of why the golden boy lost his lustre.

One big mistake was to think that it would be enough to present himself as the safe pair of hands who protected the economy during the pandemic and can be relied on to see Britain safely through an inflation-fuelled tempest. Running on competence