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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Westminster has woken up to the fact that Rishi Sunak is not good at politics. Grumbling about the prime minister’s professional limitations is comforting for Conservatives, because the hope is that with the right staff around him, or more practice, a better, sharper Sunak might emerge. Given that there is no smooth or costless way of changing the party’s leader, you can see why that narrative appeals to Tory MPs. Just a few changes in Downing Street’s personnel, perhaps some robust coaching for the principal, and hey presto: one election-winning candidate.
But it misses a deeper problem: Sunak’s biggest shortcoming is political, and it is shared by his party.
Boris Johnson’s leadership increasingly recalls that old joke about the 1960s — if you can remember it, you weren’t really there. But, contrary to the myth that has grown around it, the former leader’s manifesto was pretty close to that favoured by the median Briton. He promised more money for schools, police and hospitals, said that tax rates would remain flat and falling and was committed to the net zero programme.
In almost every way, Sunak offers a plan further away from the wishes of the average Brit than the one Johnson had. A YouGov poll found that 57 per cent of Britons favour spending more on public services against 27 per cent who prioritise tax cuts, while More in Common found 66 per cent saying they are either “worried” or “very worried” about climate change, essentially regardless of class, location or creed. Sunak meanwhile proposes to go to the country on a ticket that pledges to cut public spending to fund the abolition of national insurance and a slower path to net zero.
When a political party that was elected after running towards the median voter runs away from them and towards itself: how do you think that’s going to turn out? It shouldn’t be a difficult question: it’s a movie with only one ending, no matter how many times political parties insist on remaking it.
That’s not to say that Johnson’s programme wasn’t self-contradictory and riddled with impossible trade-offs. It was. But there is a political cost to moving away from it, particularly if at every turn you choose to move towards the minority opinion, as Sunak has done.
The prime minister is probably right in thinking that it is one thing for voters to want these things in the abstract and quite another to welcome them in practice. Look at the detail of the YouGov and More in Common polls, and voters’ preference for tax rises to support public spending tends to mean that taxes should go up for someone else.
But as Sunak is also learning on immigration, which Conservative voters oppose at current levels while also opposing anything that might meaningfully reduce it, there is no electoral reward for not doing something because you think the voters won’t thank you for it. His strategy might work for the Conservatives in opposition, but in government it is a recipe for leaving office faster and more emphatically.
And that’s not Sunak’s only political problem. Another significant one is that he took over after Liz Truss’s 49-day long premiership. Her biggest achievement was to shift British voters from blaming the UK’s economic woes on a combination of bad luck, the pandemic, Vladimir Putin and the Conservatives’ mistakes, to almost exclusively blaming the Tories. Sunak has been unable to reverse this perception.
But while the prime minister’s biggest self-inflicted wound is his inability to pursue a popular Johnsonian path, his party’s problem is different. While it is easy to find Tories willing to say publicly that Sunak’s government is too far to the left, it is hard to find anyone who will give voice to the truth: that it is in fact further to the right than Johnson’s, just as Truss’s was, and this is part of why the Conservatives are now doing less well electorally than they once did.
Some MPs and aides will say this in private — but they are outnumbered by those who think that Sunak is some kind of moderate and that the Johnson era shows that radicalism can be electorally effective. That delusion means that when the Tories lose the next election, the contest to replace him as Conservative leader will be predicated on the idea that he lost because he was too moderate, too centrist and too close to the middle ground of British politics.
The reality that he has moved the Tory party further from the centre, and therefore closer to defeat, won’t be allowed to intrude. And that collective delusion is far more harmful to the Conservative party than any of Sunak’s gaffes or political howlers.