In leaked footage obtained by the British political and cultural magazine The New Statesman, United Kingdom prime ministerial candidate Rishi Sunak admits taking money from deprived urban areas to reallocate it to other parts of the country.
"We inherited a bunch of formulas from Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that," he can be heard saying.
The revelation is expected to dent his campaign. The Foreign Office minister Zac Goldsmith said, "This is one of the weirdest – and dumbest – things I’ve ever heard from a politician," as reported by The Guardian.
Two recent polls gave Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Sunak's rival in the race, a decisive lead over the Indian-origin former chancellor of the exchequer.
The last survey, conducted by website ConservativeHome, put her around 32 percentage points ahead of Sunak. It showed that 58 percent of those polled supported Truss, while Sunak had the support of about 26 percent of the Tory members, while 12 percent were undecided.
Another survey by YouGov showed that Truss's "lead over her rival has in fact grown to 38 points, with the foreign secretary currently holding 69 percent of the headline vote, to Sunak’s 31 percent."
The results of the contest to decide the next leader of the Conservative Party and the next prime minister of Britain will be come out on 5 September.
(With inputs from The New Statesman and The Guardian.)
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