Sunak's California references may have impacted chances

London: Former UK Chancellor and prime ministerial hopeful Rishi Sunak's team feels his references to the Silicon Valley in California early on in the campaign to succeed Boris Johnson as British Prime Minister may have impacted his chances in the Conservative Party leadership contest.

The Daily Telegraph' quotes sources within Sunak's Ready4Rishi campaign team to claim that it was when he mentioned California for the third time in less than 10 minutes that they felt things were not going the right way.

On stage at one of the early hustings at Eastbourne on August 5 to lure Tory members voting between Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, the British Indian former minister answered a question about the career he would choose as a young graduate by reflecting on the culture of enterprise he saw while living on the West Coast of the US between 2004 and 2006.

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 replied.

Staff back at his campaign headquarters in central London felt his focus on California showed he was out of touch and summed up his failure to win over grassroots Tory members as polls showed members backing Truss by more than two to one.

People started to say that it wasn't going to happen now and he wasn't connecting with voters in the room, a source on the campaign told the newspaper.

He kept talking about California and tech. It became an open secret within the campaign that he wasn't going to win. That hustings was the point things really took a turn as everyone started to realise that, the

source said.