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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
During a recent invite-only briefing for Conservative party parliamentary candidates, some of the more mathematically-inclined members started to become uneasy.
The strategy, they were told, was to focus relentlessly on former Tory voters who either say they will not vote, or plan to back a party that is to the right of the Conservatives. Local candidates should then seek to identify a local issue — perhaps an extravagance by a Labour or Liberal Democrat council, a football club in need of support or a housing development worth blocking — to get them the extra votes needed to be elected or re-elected in their seats.
What bothered those listening was that as they thought about the figures, they realised the strategy being discussed was not enough for the Tories to win. It might be enough to mitigate their losses, and even to force Labour to govern as a minority administration. But it cannot lead them to outright success.
Labour’s twin victories in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire last week mean that even the innumerate now realise that the Conservatives’ electoral strategy is not working. As a result, Rishi Sunak is facing inevitable calls to once again reset his government — to embark on a “bold” reshuffle and make some kind of blood sacrifice to show that he is changing. (Greg Hands, the party’s chair, is high up the list of those likely to be culled.)
But a high-profile reshuffle or another change of direction is not going to help the prime minister turn things around. His biggest mistake has been looking for a political solution to a policy problem. That cannot cure the Tories’ troubles because they are the result not of political issues, but of policy ones.
Some of them are just the result of bad timing — the inflationary pressures created by the end of lockdown and the war in Ukraine would have posed major challenges for any government. Others are the direct result of decisions taken or not taken by successive Conservative governments.
The failure to build enough prisons, which meant that the final weeks of the by-election campaigns were dominated by stories about English and Welsh judges being told to jail fewer criminals, is one example. Sunak’s own failure to tackle the issue of faulty concrete in schools while he was chancellor is another.
But the bigger issue is this: when people can’t get a doctor’s appointment, when petty crimes go unsolved and when two-thirds of British households are cutting back on spending due to the rising cost of living, political strategies are no longer adequate solutions.
That at the last election, the Conservatives ran on a platform that explicitly promised they would fix public services and rebalance the economy aggravates the problem. In one of the brainstorming sessions that led to the Tory party adopting its “Get Brexit Done” slogan in 2019, one aide suggested “End the Uncertainty”. That became a bit of a running joke internally, and it would no doubt have landed poorly had it made it on to a poster. But it did capture something important about what voters wanted in 2019 — an end not just to the rows over Brexit, but to the noise and division of the previous three years as a whole.
Yet since 2019, the Conservatives have delivered nothing but noise. Three prime ministers, lockdown-breaking parties, incessant infighting and internal disarray: these are deep-seated problems that cannot be cured by one speech.
Sunak’s strategy is far from flawless. His latest reboot, an attempt to cast himself as a change candidate by talking about “30 years of vested interests standing in the way of change”, is a poorly conceived and badly executed mess.
Even the timeframe is a demonstration of his weakness. The only reason to pick “30 years” is because 40 years would imply that not everything Margaret Thatcher did was good and 20 that not everything Tony Blair did was bad. Sunak is not strong enough to get away with either heresy, so instead we have the facile suggestion that a golden thread links every Tory prime minister from John Major to Liz Truss.
But all this “strategy” is a lot like a Tory parliamentary candidate looking at the minutes of their local Labour council to determine what they can use as a wedge issue. Yes, getting those things right can help, but that doesn’t fix the problem when the fundamentals are bad.
What should Sunak do differently? Given that his problems lie in policy and delivery, so too do his thin chances of salvation. If he wants to turn things around, he will be better off rolling the dice with a new policy for the NHS than a new party chair.