A new prime minister

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: the United Kingdom’s next prime minister: Rishi Sunak.

Sunak had already run for Britain’s top job and was runner-up. But then he got another shot and the chance to say “I told you so.”

NICK EICHER, HOST: Sunak is the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, a fancy English way of saying Treasury chief. Liz Truss beat him in the contest to replace Boris Johnson, who also resigned as prime minister. But Truss packed her turbulent term in office into a mere 45 days.

Johnson briefly attempted a comeback, but bailed out.

That left Sunak out front, and he won the race yesterday to be leader of the Conservative Party.

Today’s the day he takes office and he faces many challenges, to put it mildly.

Here to talk about it is Glen Duerr. He is originally from the UK and teaches International Studies at Cedarville University.

REICHARD: Professor, thanks for joining us!

GLEN DUERR, GUEST: Thank you for having me.

REICHARD: First of all, let’s talk about the process in the UK. It’s not like the United States where we elect a president who stays there for four years. Prime ministers seem to come and go more frequently in the UK. Help us understand the process of selecting a head of state.

DUERR: It’s very complex in the parliamentary system, really depends on the country, and also depends on the political party. It can shift. Even the contest earlier this summer to the one we just saw within the Conservative Party, they've been radically different in terms of a timeline and how the member was selected as prime minister. So it really can depend on circumstance. But the big issue in the UK and parliamentary systems is a vote of non-confidence, which can remove a prime minister very, very rapidly, either from within one's own party or from the outside. Or in a case like we just saw, there's a resignation and then an opportunity for new members of Parliament to try and become that prime minister. So we've actually seen a whole bunch of different ways even very recently. A parliamentary system can be very stable if we think through Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair. They were in for a cumulative almost 29 years between the three of them. And yet, even in this year 2022, we've seen three prime ministers as well, in Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, and Boris Johnson. So it really depends on the time and the circumstance and the political issues at hand.

REICHARD: Well Liz Truss is going to go down in the history books as the British prime minister with the shortest ever term. What went wrong for Liz Truss?

DUERR: You have to go back to 1827 with Prime Minister George Canning who served for about four months to get anywhere close. And so you're absolutely right, it is a very difficult distinction. But it's also worth noting in the parliamentary system that one’s career is not over. She could plausibly come back. She could plausibly serve in the cabinet again. So the advice to Liz Truss is keep going. Legacies can be changed as well. But in terms of what went wrong, the Conservative Party's been in power since 2010. So that's a part of it. It's a deeply, deeply divided party. There's a very, very centrist faction, and there's a very populist-rightists, Brexit faction of the party and the two have often competed. Boris Johnson was probably the star member of the Brexit wing and Liz Truss was maybe something between the two. She ended up saying that she supported Brexit very, very heavily, but she actually voted against it in 2016. And when she came to power early in the summer, part of her challenge was facing everything that we face here in the United States. It was still at the end of COVID, inflation is very high in the UK, it's above 10%. And they're still trying to figure out Brexit. The Scottish National Party is still knocking on the door to have a second independence referendum. There are issues between Ireland and Northern Ireland. And so there's just a massive amount that's on the desk of the prime minister. And what she put in place was a mini-budget that was supposed to slash taxes, especially for the wealthiest, pretty significantly. And it was kind of in the mold of Thatcher supply side economics to grow the economy and to grow the tax base, but it requires some patience and some pain to do that. And she opted to take a U-turn after being warned by the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, of some 45 billion pounds in unfunded tax cuts. And there were also some conversations with other world leaders who warned her. And so she took a U-turn, basically walking back some of the promises she'd made. And what ended up happening is she lost the core support of her major supporters. And those within the kind of centrist faction within the conservative party didn't trust her either. You couple that with a number of high profile resignations—the Home Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, two very powerful cabinet positions in the United Kingdom—and it ended up that the writing was on the wall for her to resign.

REICHARD: So many things piled up. We mentioned that Rishi Sunak is the former Treasury chief in London. What else can you tell us about the next prime minister?

DUERR: He’s 42 years old. He will be the youngest prime minister in over 100 years. But the punch line doesn't really reveal everything because both Tony Blair and David Cameron were 43 when they entered office. So it's not like it's completely different. But he is a brand new generation. Born in 1980. He's the very end of Generation X, right before we get into the millennial generation. So that's going to be a big shift. He is one of the wealthiest Britons. His wife is the daughter of one of the founders of Infosys, one of the largest companies in the world that was founded in India in the high tech sector. He also attended Stanford University for his MBA, so he's lived in the United States, and by many reports is very USA-friendly, and in all likelihood would have a good relationship with the United States. And will look to maintain the special relationship between the UK and the United States. He's only been an MP since 2015, which is a surprise. Normally, one has to solve for a lot longer, usually decades, to get into power within a party and then to become the prime minister. He achieved that in only seven years. And as you mentioned, he was the kind of equivalent of the Secretary of the Treasury, what's called the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It's the second most powerful position in the UK Government in terms of what one can do. And he was the person that rolled out the budgets for Prime Minister Boris Johnson. And he’s typically been viewed as very, very popular as a result of that. But again, with the factions within the party, he was supposed to cut taxes but then with the COVID issues, ended up like in the United States putting a lot of government monies to keeping businesses afloat. And so he's gained a fair bit of populist popularity, but the hardcore supporters of conservative economic tenants tend to view him with mistrust. So he's going to try and glue those factions back together upon being appointed as prime minister.

REICHARD: Glen Duerr is professor of international studies at Cedarville University. Professor, thanks so much!

DUERR: My pleasure, thank you for having me.

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