The Sunak plot thickens: who paid for the ‘Labour landslide’ poll?

The plot thickens. It may have been the worst attempted leadership coup ever, with Rishi Sunak’s hold on No 10 strengthened and the Conservative Party’s image further tarnished – but it has the compelling watchability of a classic whodunit. And whodunit in this case is, in true Agatha Christie style, none of the colourful characters with an obvious motive who have already been introduced in this tale of dysfunctional Tories.

The Tory right is currently spawning more organisations than the Bennite left did when the Labour Party was going through a mirror image of today’s factionalism in the 1980s. Where then, on the so-called left, we had the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Rank and File Mobilising Committee, today on the so-called right we have the latest Liz Truss vehicle, Popular Conservatism (shortened to PopCon), and the Conservative Britain Alliance (CBA).

The CBA is organised by David Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator and a Daily Telegraph columnist, and it paid for the seat-by-seat megapoll that was designed to agitate for Sunak to be replaced. But the identity of the donor, or donors, who provided the CBA with the £20,000 or more needed to pay for a poll with a 14,000 sample remains a mystery.

It is assumed that they have previously given money to the Conservative Party, having supported Johnson or Truss or both, and share the view of a large chunk of the party membership that Sunak is a traitor.

Suspicion fell immediately, therefore, on Peter Cruddas, the Tory donor ennobled by Johnson against the advice of the House of Lords Appointments Commission. He was involved in setting up another faction, the Conservative Democratic Organisation, a Tory Bennite campaign to give more power to party members at the expense of MPs.

It was always careful to promote the principle of “ensuring the Conservative Party is representative of the membership and fairly represents their views”, rather than to agitate for the return of Johnson himself – just as the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy pretended to care about the same principle, rather than the leadership ambitions of Tony Benn.

But Lord Cruddas told the Financial Times yesterday: “This has nothing to do with me. I haven’t given any donations to any political body or party for more than a year.”

Who else could it be? The FT also asked Paul Marshall, the joint owner of GB News – another former Tory donor and a Brexit supporter. According to the pink paper, a spokesperson said he “denied paying for the poll, and said he had never previously heard of the Conservative Britain Alliance”.

No doubt other rich people who fit the profile are being phoned today to be asked for their comments. Anonymous supporters of the prime minister have suggested that people who are preparing to finance Suella Braverman’s leadership bid are behind the plot, prompting angry denials from anonymous supporters of the former home secretary.

Meanwhile, Lord Frost has been summoned to the drawing room for a grilling by Hercule Poirot. The part of the detective is being played by Nicholas True, the Conservative leader of the House of Lords. Lord True is reported to have told Lord Frost that he must name the backers of the CBA or face being expelled from the Conservative group in the upper house.

This is a sanction that should matter to Lord Frost, who had been expected to give up his peerage to stand for election to the House of Commons, although he has not, so far, applied to be the Tory candidate in any seat.

Perhaps Lord True will gather all the suspects in a Lords dining room shortly to unveil the culprit. It may be that the audience for this whodunit will say, “Oh, them...”, and change channels when the CBA’s backers are eventually named. It is not as if the cost of one poll, even if it is a fancy multilevel regression and post-stratification analysis, is a huge sum in the history of British political funding. And it is not as if the plot to oust Sunak has been anything other than a miserable failure.

But the mystery of the CBA’s funding does matter for the future of the Conservative Party. As David Gauke, the Tory MP who was expelled from the parliamentary party by Johnson for ideological thought-crime, put it: “Post-election, there’s going to be plenty of money spent for the purpose of moving the Tory party further to the right.”

The platform of the ideologues who want to take over the Tories after the election was set out clearly by the poll question asked on behalf of the CBA, pitting a “hypothetical” Tory leader against Keir Starmer. This leader would be tough on small boats; be tough on crime and antisocial behaviour; cut legal immigration; cut taxes; and cut NHS waiting times. It might be described as Johnson-Trussite impossibilism, a mirror-image of the Bennite impossibilism that convulsed the Labour Party in the 1980s and nearly won the 2017 election.

But unlike the Labour variety, this Tory impossibilism doesn’t have a leadership candidate. Kemi Badenoch, still the bookmakers’ favourite to be leader of the opposition after the election, has already shown a fatal streak of reasonableness, refusing to scrap all EU-derived law. Penny Mordaunt put on a shocking display of loyalty to Sunak in the Commons yesterday, praising him as a “wonderful dad”. But then who? Braverman? Robert Jenrick? Nigel Farage? Priti Patel? David Frost? Really?

The plot thickens. And it doesn’t make any more sense.