The nightwatchman

Rishi Sunak has lasted a month so it’s probably worth doing an assessment of how he’s doing so far and where things are going to go. His government represents the culmination of three different overlapping trends. Unfortunately, none of those trends look good for him.

Economic crisis

The skies had been steadily darkening for some time. The British economy had looked anaemic ever since the Brexit vote, with business investment put on hold and the gumming up of trade with EU, then (in common with the rest of the world) it was hit by the bolt from the blue that was Covid-19, followed by supply chain problems and soaring inflation. This worsened with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, causing fuel prices to rise still more giddily.

The government had for a long time done its best to gloss over or minimise these problems and their consequences. The OBR estimates the cumulative cost of Brexit at 4% of GDP: twice the cost of Covid-19. Since it was led by avowed Leavers, it was instinctively hostile to any suggestion that Brexit may have harmed the economy. This, as we shall see later, is now a major problem.

The government had — correctly — spent money like there was no tomorrow during the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak, supporting businesses and their employees with the furlough scheme and investing in the vaccine programme. More questionably it had promoted “eat out to help out” and lavished vast largesse on friends and family via its VIP lane for suppliers. All this stored up a bill for the future, one which the government did not much discuss with voters.

The government loudly gave martial aid to Ukraine and, less eagerly, financial support to those struggling with the fuel bills that rose as a consequence. Still it did not take the time to talk with the public about the consequences of this spending.

Reality bit on 23 September 2022 when Kwasi Kwarteng delivered his disastrous non-budget. It wasn’t that the Conservatives were ready to talk about the problem but the resolute way in which the transient government showed itself determined to ignore it and instead splurge yet more money resulted in the markets taking fright.

Rishi Sunak had been warning in the summer Conservative leadership election campaign about the dangers ahead. His party chose not to listen to him then. His party having appointed him to replace Liz Truss, he had not just a mandate but an implied instruction to deal with the crisis.

Conservative irresponsibility

The Conservative party was for many years the party of sound money and solidity. It wasn’t just the party of sound money and solidity at any point, but that was one of its central messages to the electorate: you might not like their attitudes or policies, but if you believed their branding you could rely on them to look after the national interest and run the country and its economy competently.

Following the Brexit referendum vote, the Conservatives have slowly transformed their branding. The Rubicon was crossed when they chose Boris Johnson to replace Theresa May. The man whose policy on cake was pro having it and pro eating it applied that approach to the whole of government.

This strategy of irresponsibility served the government well for a time. Why have boring and nuanced policies when policies painted in bright primary colours poll better? If Getting Brexit Done in a particularly extreme way causes exporters to say that they are suffering severe problems, it’s simpler to deny that there are any such problems or to cast aspersions on individual exporters’ motives. If migrants are coming on lifeboats, fulminate about the French rather than seek to work with them. If tax rises would cause pain for some voters, try to avoid having them. If you must have social distancing restrictions for an infectious disease, don’t follow them yourselves. On no account ever accept that you are having to choose the lesser of two evils or make a trade-off.

George W Bush noted that you can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on. Such an approach works for a while. It doesn’t work when external reality intrudes.

External reality has intruded in the form of a long-brewing political financial crisis that touches on every aspect of government from the NHS in crisis to the practical abandonment of the concept of levelling-up (however you define that concept).

Unfortunately, a large part of the Conservative party has found that it thoroughly enjoyed the strategy of irresponsibility. We saw that in the summer when leadership candidates who majored on responsibility and sobriety trailed in the wake of those who set out their stall on Brexit purity and culture warfare. Liz Truss won by pandering to exactly this tendency.

You’d have thought that the trajectory of Liz Truss’s premiership would have acted as a purgative. But no. Over 100 Conservative MPs, confronted with external proof of Rishi Sunak’s warning that this was not the time for largesse or irresponsibility, decided that the best man for the top job was Boris Johnson, irresponsibility incarnate. They’re not ready to make nice just yet.

Brexit

Leave won the referendum 52:48. From the way that Leavers have conducted themselves ever since, you’d have thought that they had won 70:30. At no point have Leavers made even the vaguest attempt to reach out to defeated opponents and persuade them that they had a place in their vision of the future. Abraham Lincoln supposedly once said: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” This is not a thought that has ever crossed the mind of any Leaver.

Instead, Leavers have done the exact opposite. Apparently because they have no clear idea what they wanted to do with Brexit, they have competed at every stage to move to the extreme. Where once they talked of staying in the single market, now the very idea of even smoother trading links with the EU is seen as a betrayal of Brexit by many of them. The deal that they so happily signed up to in 2019 including the Northern Irish Protocol is now seen as utterly insupportable.

What has happened was both predictable and predicted. In the absence of any coherent positive prospectus for post-Brexit Britain, the public have come to the conclusion that the whole idea is a turkey. In the most recent poll by YouGov on the subject, just 32% thought that it was in retrospect a good idea (56% thought it now the wrong decision). Still more worrying for Leavers, all of that decay is attributable to those of working age. Pensioners, who have been largely insulated from the practical effects of Brexit, remain divided in exactly the same proportions as they were in 2016: 60/40 in favour of Brexit. Among those under 50, voters divide nearly 4:1 against Brexit. If you’re of working age and you still support Brexit, you’re rapidly becoming weird.

Every year 500,000 people, just over 1% of the electorate, die. Those are overwhelmingly concentrated among pensioners, Brexit’s remaining support base. Just to stanch the bleeding and keep the woeful levels of support that Brexit currently enjoys, Leavers need to gain the support of that many younger voters. What is on the horizon to change those voters’ minds?

In another recent poll, just 19% thought Britain was heading for brighter days while 67% thought that Britain was in decline. That 19% figure is substantially lower than the 32% who YouGov found thought Brexit was in retrospect the right choice. Viewed through that lens, even the remaining support for Brexit looks vulnerable. The public is on the brink of forming a consensus that the whole thing was a terrible mistake.

The rising Sunak

Rishi Sunak entered Parliament in 2015 and after just over seven years ascended to the top job. He isn’t just the youngest Prime Minister for over 200 years, he’s also one of the least experienced Parliamentarians to take that office. His rise was meteoric.

Ironically given the likely tone of his government, he first secured considerable national popularity as a Chancellor of the Exchequer who gave away lots of money to the public. In the short term, this is a fairly easy trick to pull off. As he is no doubt keenly aware, this leads to problems in the longer term when that money needs to be taken back.

Even in that fairly short period in the public eye, he has made two serious mistakes that allow us to make some judgements about his character. The second was the more discussed one: his inability to understand how utterly misjudged it was for his extremely wealthy wife to retain her non-dom status for so long at a time when he as Chancellor was going to be asking just about everyone else in the country to make considerable financial contributions.

He can recover from that mistake, though it did tarnish his image with the general public, both for the attempt to retain personal privilege and for his tone-deaf response to entirely reasonable questioning about this. I’m not at all sure that he can recover from his first serious mistake.

In January 2022, Boris Johnson was revealed to have attended at least one highly questionable gathering in Downing Street having already repeatedly denied in Parliament that any social gatherings had taken place, in implausible defiance of mounting evidence. The public was burning with indignation. Calls for Boris Johnson’s resignation were coming from all directions. If Rishi Sunak had resigned at that point, Boris Johnson’s position would probably have been irretrievable in the short term as well as in the medium term. At the time, Rishi Sunak was the obvious successor. In all likelihood he would have secured the office of Prime Minister then.

Few, I think, would argue that the events of the year have worked out better for the Conservative party than an early replacement of Boris Johnson by Rishi Sunak would have done. Why didn’t Rishi Sunak move then? It seems from the outside that he is so used to things falling into his lap that he doesn’t realise that sometimes he has to make active moves and that sometimes he needs to make a stand. As things turned out, he is blamed anyway (ridiculously) by Boris Johnson’s supporters for knifing the former Prime Minster, so it isn’t even as if he has come to the office with perceived cleaner hands. All that happened was that he gave Boris Johnson more time to inflict lasting damage on the Conservative party’s brand and Liz Truss more time to establish her credentials for the coming leadership election: disastrously for the country, the Conservative party and Rishi Sunak.

Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister at a time of national debacle. He probably feels a sense of vindication, given that things panned out exactly as he warned his party. That may do him no good at all because the public sees the debacle and blames his party. The original Cassandra didn’t have a happy ending either.

From the start, he has been hamstrung by the Conservative party’s institutional irresponsibility. He was effectively forced to pick a Cabinet designed to keep an uneasy armistice in place. So his Home Secretary is manifestly unfit for the job but impossible to remove for reasons of party unity. All he can do (which he has done) is have her chaperoned by nominally junior ministers to keep her in check. He has been discomfited by the speedy need to dismiss Gavin Williamson for bullying behaviour which he must have known about. Dominic Raab is also under investigation for bullying. Other potential landmines are rusting round the Cabinet table: for example, Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs have yet to be fully explained. It’s hard to portray yourself as offering a fresh start in such circumstances.

Still, the public have been at least prepared to take a look at him. The main focus of his first month has been working alongside Jeremy Hunt to steady the budgetary ship. The fruits of their labours were unveiled last week in the autumn statement. There are going to be a lot of tax rises and a lot of spending cuts — collectively worth over £50 billion. The immediate future is beyond grim. Living standards are in sharp decline both this year and next. The public are hardly happy but seem to recognise the necessity of action. One of the main audiences, the markets, have accepted in the short term that this government is at least serious.

The press response, however, was atrocious. “Tories soak the strivers”, screamed the Mail to its readership of featherbedded pensioners, who retained the benefit of the triple lock despite its expense. Andrew Neil declared it the moment that Brexit died. “The Government”, he wrote, “was supposed to create a post-Brexit low-tax, low-regulation, free-wheeling economic environment which would unleash homegrown entrepreneurs and turn Britain into a beacon for foreign investment, with enterprising business folk flooding to our shores. After Thursday, that is not going to happen.” (For a man who believes that he has never shown his hand on Brexit, he has a very specific understanding of what he thinks the Brexit vote was about, an understanding that many, perhaps most, Leave voters would not have shared. But I digress.)

This press reaction, echoed by backbench MPs such as Esther McVey and Jacob Rees-Mogg, reflects the views of the irresponsibilist wing of the Conservative party. Rishi Sunak is a truer Thatcherite than any of them: Geoffrey Howe famously increased taxes in the midst of a recession in 1981. The idea that tax cuts are automatically right wing is very recent indeed.

What this reaction also shows, however, is that Rishi Sunak has yet to establish a narrative for his government other than the immediate management of a crisis. What does he think his government is going to be for? He hasn’t tried to tell us.

Rishi Sunak has also been trying to rework relations with the EU. He has set a new tone over the Northern Irish Protocol, one which has been received well in Brussels. Jeremy Hunt accepted that trade barriers with the EU had been harmful, and hot on the heels of that acceptance the Sunday Times blazoned across its front page that Britain would seek a Swiss-style relationship with the EU, albeit one without freedom of movement. This unlikely scenario has predictably been met with hysterics from the irresponsibilists: headlines like “Don’t Betray Us On Brexit” in the Mail and “Fury At ‘Absurd Idea’ To Go Soft On Brexit” in the Express are supported with obliging quotations from MPs such as Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg. It has already been officially denied.

Again, Rishi Sunak’s problem is that he has so far been unable to articulate what he is trying to achieve from any reset with the EU. In the absence of any such explanation, his internal opponents are supplying one for him.

A short interlude on the future of Brexit

It seems likely to me that Rishi Sunak has identified exactly the problem for Brexit that I note above — that it is now widely viewed as a mistake and in all likelihood its support will decline if nothing is done. A Leaver who drew that conclusion would realise that action needed to be taken now if Brexit was to endure. There remains a chance of that if Brexit could be put on a stable footing by the time of the next change of government.

What would happen if Brexit were not on a stable footing by the time of the next change of government? The new government would be required to act. A government that was ideologically sympathetic to soggy internationalism would set up a rolling maul, bit by bit undoing each aspect that Leavers treasured. Out of power, Leavers would be divided each time among themselves as to whether to acquiesce or whether to fight. They would look confused, reactionary and weird.

I don’t think anyone at the top of the Labour party has a grand plan to undo Brexit, as opposed to a vague sympathy with the ambition. But if Labour come to power, they may well find that they undo it piecemeal anyway. There will be no natural stopping point until such point as a referendum would be required, and by the time that point had been reached the electoral landscape would look very different from today’s. The pressure from their activist base would be entirely in one direction.

If you are a Leaver reading this and you want Brexit to endure, you need to ask yourself now what compromises you are prepared to live with and — just as importantly — how loudly you are willing to take on those on the fringes who are unwilling to compromise at all. The signs are that Rishi Sunak wants to try to do this. This is probably the last chance to create a Brexit that endures in any substance. Since Leavers willing to confront the fringes have throughout the process been conspicuous by their absence, it is a last chance that will probably be missed.

Brexit is not the only or even main problem that Britain faces. It is, however, a substantial one, one the public have firm views on and one that is creating immediate problems thanks to the inept way that it was implemented. The Conservatives’ position on it is becoming literally incredible. You cannot sensibly claim to be focused on delivering growth and ignore the hindrance on growth that would be easiest to fix and which most of the public have spotted. This is Meatloaf economics: they would do anything for growth but they won’t do *that*.

Some Conservatives are tiptoeing around this: Jeremy Hunt and Robert Jenrick, for example. Tiptoeing will not be enough. However, Rishi Sunak is entirely typical of the type of Leaver I have just described: he lacks the courage and perhaps the support base to articulate this in public. As I’ve noted, he’s already failed one big test of leadership by failing to make an early stand when Boris Johnson had completely discredited himself over Partygate. There’s nothing in his past that suggests he will do better now. So he will in all probability fail.

Andrew Neil was right, I think, that this was the week that Brexit died, but he was wrong about the timing: it didn’t die with the autumn statement, it died when the extreme Leavers signalled that they would fight against any kind of lasting accommodation with the EU. It would be a fitting end.

Where do we go from here?

Rishi Sunak is a safe pair of hands. Right now, a safe pair of hands does not look remotely good enough to salvage Conservative fortunes. The Conservatives are something like 20% behind Labour in the polls. He faces an opponent who is also a safe pair of hands. The public blames the Conservatives for much of the mess that the country is in. The economic pain felt by the public is only going to get worse over the next couple of years. “Don’t let Labour ruin it” is not a slogan that’s going to work in 2024 if, as expected, the economy has stagnated for the entire Parliament.

The Conservatives urgently need a theme. Rishi Sunak is not a man for themes. He’s a man embodying smooth managerialism in a party that no longer values those things in the way it once did. He looks like a man out of time.

Things can always turn up. If they do, Rishi Sunak is smart enough to exploit them. But right now it’s not at all obvious what can turn up. In the absence of anything actually turning up, it looks like he is just batting out the remaining overs before the dimming light ends the Conservative innings.