Rishi Sunak’s manifesto is thin gruel

Rishi Sunak today launched a manifesto that might suffice for a governing party polling at level pegging with the opposition in a country where things have been going well.

You will no doubt have spotted the problems with this: he’s more than 20 points behind in the polls largely thanks to losing most of his right flank to an insurgent rival, while the British public overwhelmingly believes their country is heading in the wrong direction. So a technocrat’s bloodless canter through what one of my social media followers aptly described as ‘magnolia gruel’ was never going to cut it.

Sunak’s presentation was heavy on the pecuniary aspects of the British living standards challenge (tax rates, state pension levels) but notably light on the non-pecuniary ones (cohesion-shredding immigration levels, criminal justice system collapse, public services capacity constraints, the elite onslaught against British heritage and cultural norms).