British Prime Minister Boris Johnson makes a statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, on July 7, 2022. [Source: CNN News]

The next prime minister of the United Kingdom will inherit a mess that some members of the governing Conservative Party believe will be impossible to manage.

With just six weeks until Boris Johnson’s successor walks through the famous black door of 10 Downing Street, the two remaining candidates are making a bad situation worse by rubbing acid into the wounds of a party so badly divided it could be forced to call an early election and hope for the best.

For the purposes of this article, CNN spoke with multiple sources across the Conservative Party on the condition of anonymity.

There are a few reasons for this, starting with how the new prime minister will be chosen.

Johnson’s replacement will not be elected by the 47 million adults registered to vote, but by a much smaller group of around 160,000 grassroots Conservative Party members. The winner will be announced on September 5.

This is constitutionally quite proper.

In the UK, prime ministers are not elected directly.

Instead, members of parliament are elected and the leader of the party with the largest number of MPs conventionally forms a government.

The Conservatives still enjoy a healthy majority from Johnson’s 2019 election win, so his successor simply inherits that majority and takes over as the head of government.

It does, however, create a bizarre dynamic in which the two candidates remaining — Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak — must spend the next few weeks traveling the country and appealing to the priorities of an electorate that represents less than 0.5% of the voting public.

This means running on campaign issues that the candidates believe are most likely to appeal to this very small and hardly diverse group of people.

“The average age of a party member is late 50s. Just under half are of a pensionable age and they are predominately White,” says Tim Bale, who is professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and has studied the Conservative Party extensively.

“They mostly live in southern England and are (financially) comfortable. They support a strong line on law and order, they approve of low taxes but believe that public services are important and should be funded properly, especially schools, police and, of course, the health service,” Bale adds.

Unsurprisingly, given the cost-of-living crisis, the main issue of debate has been how to handle the economy. Truss is calling for a different approach from Johnson’s tax rises, and claims that cutting taxes immediately would create growth.

Sunak argues that he believes this is fantasy economics, given the UK is still recovering from the economic shock of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This all might sound rather tame until you consider that Sunak was Johnson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, or finance minister.

A narrative has now emerged among Truss supporters that although she was in Johnson’s cabinet as his Foreign Secretary, she was the person most opposed to what are now being painted as Sunak’s tax rises — rather than those of his boss, Johnson.