A year on, Rishi Sunak has swapped a fast death for the Tories for a slow one
The final week of Rishi Sunak’s first year as Prime Minister serve well as a microcosm for how badly things have gotten for the Tories.
You had the humiliating announcement that a party which prides itself as being tough on crime was having to instruct judges to go easy on criminals due to overcrowding in prisons. You had the UK government rowing in behind the evolving position of the United States and European Union on Israeli invasion of Gaza, with a low-energy Foreign Office yet to carve out a distinctively British position on anything. You had yet another senior Tory exposed as a bully by a parliamentary committee, with a lengthy suspension and by-election surely to follow. And you had a crushing rejection by the public as the voters of Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire elected new Labour MPs despite the Tories defending gigantic majorities.
It was in short, a week that summed up the key fact about Rishi Sunak’s premiership: it’s failing. YouGov provide brutal confirmation of that with their latest polling showing Sunak’s personal ratings imploding with people no longer seeing him as decisive, competent, strong, or likeable. Likewise on every issue polled his approval rating had significantly dropped since last year.
It is of course true that Sunak inherited a mess, as the anarchy created by Boris Johnson’s scandals and Liz Truss’s fantasies had left people genuinely concerned that the Tory Party might not be able to form a stable government. Sunak can at least console himself that he and Jeremy Hunt managed to calm down the markets, pass not one but two sets of financial measures, and avoided provoking yet another crisis. But it increasingly seems like all Sunak has managed to do for his party is swap a quick death for a slow one.
The reason for this is that the spending cuts and tax rises he has pushed through as Prime Minister were the bare minimum needed to stop the government falling apart.
Unlike his predecessor, Hunt may have got the Office of Budget Responsibility to sign off on his spending plans, but he’s still pumping billions of borrowed money into an economy with high inflation and low unemployment, so forcing the Bank of England to keep increasing interest rates. That the base rate has more than doubled during the past year is a key reason why British households feel so sour about their finances, as they face ever-higher mortgage and credit card repayments.
Likewise, while Hunt has made some provision for increased public spending, it is nowhere near enough to overcome the challenges faced by public services that have been starved of resources by a government which keeps asking it to do more for less. But again, that means Sunak has just set them on a path towards slow deterioration rather than a sudden implosion; hardly something that will bring the public to their feet in grateful applause. The result has been a government that cannot meet even the rather basic promises that Sunak set himself last January. As he himself admitted he can’t get NHS waiting Lists down because he hasn’t given himself enough money to end the doctors strikes, while his attempts to get a grip on immigration are hampered by his failure to speed up the processing of asylum claims. He is instead reduced to literally tilting at windmills as he picks fights against infrastructure development, political correctness, and environmentalism worthy of a longshot Tory candidate in a suburban by-election.
When one looks at this broken, impotent premiership one can’t help but think back to just over two years ago when Sunak was at the height of his powers as Chancellor. Easily the most popular politician in the country, he had faced down not just Boris Johnson but virtually the entire cabinet to insist that if they wanted additional investment in schools and hospitals to address the damage caused by the pandemic, then they would have to pay for it by increasing personal taxation. Such a move was popular with swing voters and confounded a Labour Party that deep down approved of the measure.
The Tory Party would never let Rishi Sunak begin his premiership by increasing taxes in such an explicit way, indeed they ultimately forced him to scrap that very Health and Social Care Levy. And that is why he cannot address the challenges this country faces today, and so his premiership is doomed to fail. Here’s hoping Sir Keir Starmer learns the lessons from that failure before it’s too late.