Rishi Sunak and the right-wing press: heading for divorce?

Having deposed four prime ministers in less than eight years, the Conservative Party is no stranger to friendly fire. 

But former cabinet minister Simon Clarke's op-ed this week in The Telegraph, which declared that the party "will be massacred" at the next general election if Rishi Sunak remains in charge, was notable not just for its content but also for its placement.

The Telegraph has long been known as the Conservatives' "de facto house journal", said Peter Walker in The Guardian. But earlier this month, the paper published YouGov polling that projected the number of Tory MPs would fall from 350 to just 169. 

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Clarke's op-ed takes the newspaper's role in "manoeuvrings to undermine" Sunak one step further, said Walker. The Telegraph is now hoping to "reshape the party in its ideological image".

'The Telegraph assault' 

Tory peer David Frost also put pen to paper to write about the "stunningly awful" YouGov polling numbers in The Telegraph, and noted that he had played a role in shaping and analysing the survey. Frost is a "trenchant critic of Sunak", said Andrew Marr in The New Statesman, and is "fronting" the Conservative Britain Alliance, which "appears to be a paper fig leaf" for a group of donors campaigning on a tougher stance on immigration, in a bid to "avoid a potential 'extinction event'" at the hands of Reform UK. 

What's "really revealing", said the Financial Times's Stephen Bush, is that The Telegraph is not only "not on side with the prime minister in an election year", but has also "run a no-holds-barred attack". 

"The Telegraph assault", as Marr called it, centred on the "unusually large and detailed polling sample" broken down by constituency. That makes it "particularly corrosive" when so many MPs and cabinet ministers are "speculating on the likelihood of their personal defeats". 

It's clear that the paper is "willing to make trouble" for Sunak and to "undermine him", said the FT's Bush. "That is going to be a running sore for Sunak all the way until the election."

'Hacking off a protective arm'

This blue-on-blue attack may be connected to the "murky business" of The Telegraph and its sister title The Spectator "being in the middle of a tortuous sale process" to a United Arab Emirates (UAE) consortium, according to Reaction.

With the publications stuck in "ownership limbo", said Marr in The New Statesman, the Tories are "splitting in both directions". Some Thatcher-era ministers are coming out against the sale, but others, including former cabinet minister and party chair Nadhim Zahawi, are "working with the Emiratis" to recruit other key figures to an advisory board. 

That The Telegraph is going "out of its way to whack" Sunak is "less biting the hand that feeds it, more hacking off a protective arm", said Marr. 

Whitehall is "awash with rumours" that the government wants the UAE deal to go ahead because "the country needs foreign investment too much", said Reaction. 

The Telegraph's recent coverage of Sunak has also been accompanied by an in-depth account of Foreign Secretary David Cameron's "closeness to the UAE leadership". It's almost, Reaction suggested, as if the newspaper is saying it "won't go quietly this year" if the UAE ultimately wins the takeover battle.