The Conservatives gather in Manchester this weekend for what may well be their last hurrah as a governing party. Bookmakers are offering odds of 7:1 to anyone bold enough to bet on Rishi Sunak winning the next general election. The Prime Minister himself is in a gambling mood and has started to make some brave and overdue decisions: rethinking HS2 and overhauling net-zero policies. Such decisions bring short-term embarrassment, and were avoided by his predecessors, but they offer long-term dividends. The question is whether this is a wise strategy in the lead-up to an election.
Typically, a prime minister makes their big promises in a pre-election year. But Sunak recognises that short-termism has left Britain in a high-tax, low-growth trap and he hopes the public will appreciate his realism more than what he calls the ‘fairy tales’ of his Tory predecessors or Keir Starmer’s empty agenda. Sunak’s message is, in effect, that only the Tories can fix the mess created by the Tories, so vote Tory!
The political elites refuse to see that many of their orthodoxies do not hold sway over the population
While Sunak’s new strategy isn’t without risks, it’s more likely to be successful than continuing with his old policy of managerialism.
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