Sunak In Search of a Miracle

A HARD TASK LAY AHEAD of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak this week, as he and his Conservatives travelled to Manchester for their annual party conference.

He has been in office for just under a year, and both he and the Tories are miles behind in the polls. His personal rating is about -45, and the Conservatives lag Labour in double digits, though with a slight recent upturn. After 13 years in government, the party seems fatigued, and the electorate likewise.

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, recently derided Sunak as “Inaction Man”, which carried a degree of truth, because the prime minister has spent the last year trying to calm the markets, settle his party and live down the reputation for chaos left by his two immediate predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Low-profile, cautious leadership has been the order of the day.

But since that taunt, delivered face-to-face in the House of Commons, Sunak has rolled out a series of dramatic policy announce­ments, mostly based on the idea that the government’s green agenda will punish the least well-off. This, Sunak professed, was not what he wished to do in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, so he announced that the ban on the sale of petrol cars would be moved from 2030 to 2035, and the same for domestic gas boilers.

This caused a considerable stir. Was he abandoning his party’s commitment to achieving carbon net zero by 2050? Was he read­ing too much into a recent, unexpected by-election victory, when voters appeared to reject green traffic-charging measures promot­ed by the (Labour) mayor of London? No, said Rishi. He was simply on the side of poor people who would be forced to buy electric cars or install heat pumps. Here was a Tory prepared to fight on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged.

Next, Sunak set his face against a move to impose a 20-mile per hour speed limit in built-up areas, declaring that he was ending what he called “the war on motorists”. Here was a multi-millionaire setting himself up as the defender of the little guy.

These bold moves allowed him to go to this week’s conference with a degree of momentum that nobody foresaw a few months ago when, despite exuding earnestness and good intentions, he seemed disconnected and put upon, held hostage by the more radi­cal factions on the right of his party.

But can he lead the Conservatives to victory in the upcoming general election, due in around a year? Not many people outside his inner circle believe he can.

Rishi Sunak is not a gifted communicator, and is constantly mocked for sounding like a children’s TV presenter. Some perceive him as out-of-touch with the lives of ordinary people, which fits neatly with the other common perception of him, as a geeky tech­nocrat. It is often said that he is a manager, not a leader.

Personal qualities aside, he has a formidably difficult task trying to live down the last four years of Conservative confusion and calam­ity. Boris Johnson, prime minister from 2019-22, brought an extraordinarily cavalier style of leadership, uninterested in detail, allergic to ethics or transparency, mercurial and inconsistent to the point that colleagues sent out to defend the government at breakfast would find that the official line had changed by lunch.

Johnson was defenestrated when nearly 60 of his cabinet colleagues refused to serve a day longer in his government, and his successor, Liz Truss, who lasted 49 days, was installed after a fractious leadership contest which managed to pitch not only the parliamentary party against itself, but the grassroots members, who wanted Truss, against their MPs, who wanted Sunak. The grassroots got their girl.

She had promised them tax cuts, growth, more growth and sundry unicorns, but the world’s financial markets, and eventually her Westminster colleagues, turned on her after she brought in a wildly optimistic, unbalanced mini-budget, which terrified virtually all the financial institutions that looked at it. The pound crashed, interest rates soared, and Tory MPs told her that she should hand back the keys to 10 Down­ing St immediately, if not sooner.

Rishi Sunak then took on the premiership amid the smouldering ruins of both the national economy and the Conservative Party.

As the UK’s first Hindu premier, his arrival was greeted warm­ly right across the political spectrum. Those in his own party, which has something of a reputation for xenophobia, welcomed his rise as proof that the Conservatives are a modern party which promotes talent from whichever direction it comes. The liberal establishment also welcomed Sunak’s elevation as proof that the nation had overcome worries about immigration and was now fully committed to the promotion of diversity.

Most non-partisan observers have since agreed that he has done a good job of repairing much of the financial damage he inherited. But undoing damage to the Tory brand has been a tall order for such an inexperienced politician—he only en­tered Parliament in 2015—and much of his manoeuvring has been criticised as naïve. Before his recent reversals on the green agenda, his one big political stroke had been to announce five pledges by which he wanted to be judged, namely: to halve inflation, shrink the debt, grow the economy, cut hospital wait­ing lists, and stop the boats.

Sadly for him, most people can only remember the one about the migrant boats coming across the Channel, which is the one he is least likely to fulfil. The commentariat do not ex­pect him to meet any of the others, though he might get close to halving inflation. But if he does, will that change anybody’s mind about either him or the Tories?

There has been a stream of botched communications from the prime minister’s office, with leaks, contradictions, and a clumsy feeling for timing. But the biggest story in Conserva­tive politics of recent weeks has been a speech given by Home Secretary Suella Braverman to an American think-tank, in which she declared that multiculturalism has “failed”. When a child of immigrants can say such a thing, while serving in the cabinet of a child of immigrants, alongside several other children of immigrants, we can tell that somebody in the Tory party wants to break the glass and ring the alarm. Sunak mild­ly contradicted her in public, but there were strong rumours that she had cleared the speech with the Cabinet Office. She, it seems, is playing ‘bad cop’ to Rishi’s ‘good cop’.

Rishi Sunak’s bold moves allowed him to go to this week’s conference with a degree of momentum that nobody foresaw a few months ago when, despite exuding earnestness, he seemed disconnected and put upon, held hostage by the radical factions on the right of his party. But can he lead the Conservatives to victory in the upcoming general election, due in around a year?

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While the messaging may be messy, the politics in all this is clear. Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority in 2019 by creating a new electoral coalition, based on the core Conserva­tive vote, located largely in the south of England, but with the addition of a new demographic, based on traditional social and cultural values, held by less-educated manual and industrial workers, located largely in the north of England. Historically, this latter group would have voted Labour, but they liked Boris Johnson’s approachability, they liked his talk of “levelling up” the country, and they agreed with him about the necessity of leaving the European Union.

No one knows how long Johnson could have held this coalition together. It was a freak event, created partly by his own popularity, but also by the distinct unpopularity of the Labour leader he faced in 2019, Jeremy Corbyn. The perceived metropolitan biases of the modern Labour Party, plus Corbyn’s radicalism and apparent lack of patriotic feeling were key factors in the Conservatives’ success in breaching the so-called ‘red wall’ across Labour’s northern heartlands. And crucially, the issue of Brexit was still not resolved in 2019, which pulled Eurosceptic Labour voters across to Johnson’s column.

Sunak’s job is to stitch together something similar, which will not be easy.

TIMES HAVE CHANGED. People now say that “Noth­ing in this country works properly anymore.” Our schools, prisons and public buildings are falling down because they were made with flaky, cheap concrete. Our trains don’t run because the rail workers are on strike. Our health service doesn’t work because doctors are on strike. Our rivers are liter­ally full of sewage. So what have the Tories done for us in their 13 years? This is the backdrop that Sunak has to explain away.

He has neither Johnson’s charisma nor the following wind of Brexit, so his strategy is to reach out to every aggrieved voter in the country to form a malcontent coalition of motorists, ‘hardworking families’, small-state libertarians, and anyone he can inspire with the fear of immigrants, transgenderism and ‘woke’. If you can’t run on the past, or the present, then you need a compelling vision of the future to sell. And if you haven’t got that, then you can try selling a terrifying vision of the future under your opponents.

The conference strapline is ‘Long Term Decisions For A Brighter Future’, which has been widely ridiculed. It has none of the snap of recent three-word slogans, and seems instead to be seven words of prebuttal defensiveness. His colleagues might have preferred: ‘Short Term Decisions For Immediate Re-Election’.

There was also rustling in the undergrowth from ‘National Conservatives’ and groups who favour a more US Republican-style of Conservatism, all of whom are pitched way to the right of where Sunak stands, and would dump him in a moment for more radical figures like Suella Braverman or Kemi Badenoch

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One major problem for Sunak is that there isn’t much money available, and fixing public services is an expensive business. There were long-running rumours that he was intending to scrap large parts of the high-speed rail project (HS2) to connect London with the north. This would definitely please the small-state factions in his party, but would also annoy business-minded Tories and alienate many ‘red wall’ voters who saw HS2 as part of the levelling-up agenda.

From his Manchester podium he confirmed the abandon­ment of the full HS2 project, saving tens of billions of pounds, “every penny” of which will be spent on other transport links, he said. Maybe, but he’s also now got money for the ever-pop­ular tax cuts that Tories like to announce before elections. And again, Sunak’s political nous can be questioned. He announced the abandonment of a high-speed rail link to Manchester… while in Manchester.

More shrewdly, he had already announced that he would spend over a billion pounds on refurbishing ‘towns’, as opposed to ‘cities’. Translation: ‘red wall’ towns might still vote Tory, whereas cities like Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool never will.

To nearly all observers, a Sunak victory in 2024 seems a remote prospect. Many in his own party seem to agree; the con­ference was sparsely attended, while a substantial body of Tory MPs had already declared they will not be standing at the next election and are looking for other jobs. Faction fighting was very evident, with a plethora of new fringe pressure groups ap­pearing, all intent on dictating the party’s policy stances during its upcoming spell in opposition.

Several leadership hopefuls were auditioning around the conference’s fringes, and a supportive audience gathered for Liz Truss, who was promoting her radical tax-cutting small-state agenda under the banner ‘Make Britain Grow Again’. Trussites believe that she had all the right ideas but that they were presented too quickly and in the wrong order. Growth first, tax cuts second, not the other way round.

There was also rustling in the undergrowth from ‘national conservatives’ and groups who favour a more US Republican-style of conservatism, all of whom are pitched way to the right of where Sunak stands, and would dump him in a moment for more radical figures like Suella Braverman or Kemi Badenoch.

Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority in 2019 with a new electoral coalition, based on the conservative vote, but with a new demographic, based on traditional social values, held by less-educated manual and industrial workers, located largely in the north of England

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Sunak is now trying to present himself as the ‘change’ can­didate, as a man who can make difficult decisions, who will run Britain in a different style. But in Manchester there was little evi­dence of any of that, though he grabbed the next news cycle with new policies to ban smoking and reform school qualifications.

The questions remain. Can he distance himself from his party’s own history? Is he a visionary reformer who can take Britain forward for the next 10 years? Or is he just a man in search of all the friends he can get, as he tries to engineer a 2019-style electoral miracle in very different circumstances?

He’s got a very busy year ahead of him.

About The Author

Roderick Matthews

Roderick Matthews specialises in Indian history. He is the author of Jinnah vs Gandhi and Mountbatten and the Partition of British India