Everyone is finally noticing that Rishi Sunak is rubbish at politics.
Given the scale of his faux pas in bailing out of D-Day commemorations early to get back on the campaign trail, it is hard not to. As a longstanding member of the ‘Rishi is Rubbish’ club, I find it difficult not to feel the kind of proprietorial irritation that fans of cult rock bands suffer when their heroes become mainstream.
In fairness, this theory of Sunak’s ineptitude – now so validated by evidence it could almost be referred to as ‘the science’ – was first aired not by me but in a New Statesman blog before Sunak even became PM.
Back in February 2022, a Labour source told the Staggers that Keir Starmer’s team considered Sunak was ‘crap at politics’ and thought they would have the measure of him were he to replace Boris Johnson as PM. Labour’s reasoning lay in what it saw as Sunak’s flat-footed response to the cost-of-living crisis as chancellor. ‘Bring on little Rishi’, bragged a Labour insider back then.
Perhaps some Tory MPs thought this was an elaborate double-bluff by the red team, because that is exactly what they did – though his campaign to replace Boris Johnson was so error-strewn that it took them two defenestrations of sitting PMs to get him installed in Downing Street, rather than just the one.
One of the mistakes of Sunak’s campaign in his contest against Liz Truss was to come across as petulant and arrogant in a TV debate against her, making constant interruptions – traits that were on display again against Starmer this week. He also declared himself the only candidate who could beat Labour, rather than merely the candidate best able to do that – showing needless disrespect for colleagues. And video footage emerged of him boasting about how he made sure government spending was syphoned off from poor areas to prosperous ones.
Once he arrived in Downing Street, barely a month went past without a fresh catalogue of Rishi blunders. For instance, in February of this year I documented a whole rash of howlers – from accepting an on-air rich boys’ frat house bet with Piers Morgan about removing illegal migrants to Rwanda, to making despatch box jibes about Keir Starmer’s approach to gender identity despite being told that the mother of a murdered trans child was in the public gallery, to being pictured hugging Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, to issuing an almost flippant response to news of the King’s cancer – ‘I have no doubt he’ll be back to full strength in no time’.
It wasn’t just in his daily execution that Sunak was deficient. His lack of strategic nous was also blatantly obvious, evidenced when he told Paul Goodman of the Conservative Home website early in 2023 that voters were not that bothered about legal immigration levels. Oh really?
And right at the start of last year, he invited the British public to judge him on five key objectives. Three were economic metrics while the other two involved bringing down waits in the NHS and ‘stopping the boats’. Only one of the economic metrics has been properly achieved, while the numbers awaiting NHS treatment are higher and irregular migration via Channel dinghies is running at an all-time record level. How bad at politics do you have to be to specify your own preferred key performance indicators in such a way as to render them unachievable?
By November last year someone had persuaded him that it would be a good idea to sack Suella Braverman as Home Secretary and bring in David Cameron as Foreign Secretary. Had the Reform party been asked to devise a perfect Tory error, it could hardly have come up with anything more perfect.
That panic-ridden move followed Sunak using his keynote party conference speech in Manchester to scrap the HS2 route to…er…Manchester and to unveil as his two central ‘legacy’ policies a shake-up of A-levels that will probably never happen and a fiddly and gradualist plan to outlaw tobacco smoking that has already been ditched.
All the first order stuff Braverman warned him about in advance – from legal migration levels running out of control, to the deficiencies of his Rwanda legislation, to the need to nip Islamist ‘hate marches’ in the bud has been borne out by experience.
Yet fashionable opinion has only just moved on from declaring her a lightweight and thinking him the smartest political brain in any room. For the few remaining steadfast Tory tribalists out there, the next four weeks will probably be best viewed from behind a sofa.
Comments