by K.H.
Dodgy Dave, Maybot, Bojo, the human hand-grenade, and now, Rishi Sunak…the inevitable?
In the last twelve years, the Conservative party has had five leaders. Consequently, Britain has had five Prime Ministers in twelve years. That is many more than Labour’s three (excluding Harriet Harman’s brief stint as acting leader) and certainly one of the few times in British history that one party’s period in government has been so unstable. Three of those leaders have now led in 2022.
In the recent Conservative leadership election, Rishi Sunak presented himself as the inevitable and professional choice for PM. Rather than the boisterous party-centric populism of Johnson and Truss, Sunak would best be described as a flashy technocrat who strictly controls his own image. In press photos he smiles rigidly and does a faux-wave, he flaunts his massive wealth over social media with subtly placed luxury goods, and regularly strides around in unusually youthful ‘finance-bro’ fashion styles. Though novel in these ways, he remains boring and de-escalatory in the grand scheme of things. He also maintains an air of ‘competence’ and ‘stability’ – whatever that means these days.
Sunak’s political success has been rooted in being boring for the past few years, lying in wait while his predecessors destroyed themselves. In 2021, when the pandemic was prominent in everybody’s minds, Westminster journalists speculated that Sunak – then Chancellor – was preparing to challenge Johnson for the Conservative party leadership. In reality, he held his horses until July this year, when he finally resigned from Johnson’s government over a series of credibility-destroying scandals and ran for the leadership against Liz Truss. He lost, which led to Truss’s 50-day premiership, and to the stark claim by many that Sunak ‘had been right all along.’ Even during Truss’s downfall, Sunak did nothing except quietly brief that he would do literally nothing. Most notable was his non-attendance at Tory party conference, which was itself interpreted as a vote-of-no-confidence.
Subsequently, Sunak successfully convinced over half of Tory MPs to coronate him the new PM, this time without any feasible opposition (ignoring Johnson’s attempt to reseize the throne and Mordaunt’s doomed pathway to 100 MPs). Sunak’s central promises to MPs and members were not clear. The less-than-seven-day race shut down most debate, and led to unusually presidential conversations about character and personality among MPs. Facilitating this, Sunak quite literally spoke first to his party during and after winning the contest, and second to the British people. Indeed, if there was any public promise, it was to repair the reputation of the Tory party. This will be tricky in such a febrile political and economic climate. Until an election, Sunak will face persistent questions about his personal legitimacy as PM from MPs, the Tory membership, the press and the wider public.
These questions of legitimacy will be key when making difficult decisions which split his party at present. Internal party disputes over the Northern Ireland Protocol and the UK’s presence at COP-27 are examples where the influential hard-right European Research Group (ERG) will be a thorn in Sunak’s side. Additionally, keeping promises made during his leadership campaign, such as to abolish all remaining EU law offcuts, may not be a priority at a time when there is huge public craving for stability. Instead, perhaps the most likely outcome will be an unproductive, boring and staggered premiership.
Despite remaining a largely unknown quantity in terms of policy, we can deduce his likely direction from the fact he has opted to stack his cabinet mostly with right-leaning Tory MPs, and seems to be rhetorically preparing for significant public spending cuts and tax rises alongside his chancellor Jeremy Hunt. During the pandemic, Sunak was responsible for an extremely generous spending policy in the form of furlough and his name-making ‘eat out to help out’, but this – it seems – was not to his personal political taste. Instead, this ‘Austerity 2.0’ – as it has been labelled by parliamentary opposition figures – is allegedly intended to mitigate borrowing from during the pandemic, as well as calm unsettled markets after Liz Truss’s ‘mini-budget’. It harks back to 2010, but amps up the alarmist rhetoric even more. Austerity is certainly not a new idea, and it certainly isn’t one that has been successful at addressing Britain’s debt size and low productivity.
Sunak pitched himself as the boring choice for MPs, somebody who would end the chaos after Britain’s shortest premiership. However, this comes at a political cost. Nobody feels particularly inspired by him, and many are clearly exhausted by his 2010-2015 style ‘fiscal hawk’ politics. Sunak won by being the last man standing unwilling to rock the boat.
