(MENAFN) The campaign team for former UK Chancellor and potential British prime minister Rishi Sunak believes his early references to California's Silicon Valley may have hurt his prospects of winning the Conservative Party leadership race.
The Ready4Rishi campaign team believed that things were not going well when Sunak referenced California for the third time in less than 10 minutes, according to sources cited by "The Daily Telegraph."
The British Indian former minister responded to a query about the profession he would pick as a young graduate by reflecting on the "culture" of entrepreneurship he saw while residing on the West Coast of the US between 2004 and 2006. He was speaking on stage at one of the early hustings at Eastbourne on August 5 to entice Tory members voting between Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.
“I think it’s incredibly inspiring and empowering. If I was a young person, I’d want to go and do something like that,” he responded.
Staff at his campaign offices in central London believed that Truss was being supported by grassroots Conservatives by more than two to one, and that his attention on California demonstrated that he was out of touch.
“People started to say that it wasn’t going to happen now and he wasn’t connecting with voters in the room,” an outlet on the campaign informed the newspaper.
The outlet also added, “He kept talking about California and tech. It became an open secret within the campaign that he wasn’t going to win. That hustings were the point things really took a turn as everyone started to realize that.”
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