Woe is Rishi Sunak, leader of a broken Tory party

By Adrian Wooldridge

The one thing that a divided Britain can agree upon is that Rishi Sunak is a disappointment. The Labour Party accuses him of clinging onto power regardless of the people’s d­­esire for a general election. The Conservative right flails him for betraying conservative principles. Even those like me who welcomed his arrival as prime minister have been forced to recognize that he is a busted flush: The Tory Party remains about 20 points behind Labour in the polls, much as it was when he came to office, and he is putting off the election for no better reason than that he faces Armageddon.

Why has a man who was once a by-word for competence become a symbol of failure?

One answer is that he is simply no good at politics — a technocrat rather than a weather-maker who rose to the top by sucking up to the right people and executing other people’s plans.

Rather than dropping Boris Johnson’s cobbled-together Rwanda scheme (to send illegal migrants and asylum seekers to the African country), he turned it into a test of loyalty; rather than marginalizing Suella Braverman, the right-wing firebrand, he appointed her home secretary, only to sack her a year and a bit later. Although he’s a confirmed teetotaler, he lurches like a drunk from one contradictory policy to another — telling the 2023 Conservative Conference that he represents a change from 30 years of failed policies and then later appointing David Cameron as his foreign secretary.

A second answer is that he lacks both charisma and vision. He’s simply too boring to fill the top job and dominate a room. His supposed interests (football, cricket, Jilly Cooper novels, Star Wars) read like something concocted to delight the median voter. It’s hard to imagine a real leader such as Churchill or de Gaulle coming up with such a list.

How much truth is there in any of this? Yes, a weather-making politician would have dumped the Rwanda policy and replaced it with something more workable, and picked a fight with Braverman and Co. rather than trying to appease them. A niftier operator would not have fallen into Piers Morgan’s trap, taking a £1,000 ($1,250) bet that Britain would send asylum-seekers to Rwanda before the next election — a bet that both underlined Sunak’s wealth and made him look heartless. But the criticisms are nevertheless too harsh.

No good at politics? Sunak’s rise to high office was one of the most meteoric in political history. Only selected as a parliamentary candidate in 2014, he was chancellor of the exchequer by 2020 and prime minister two years later — the youngest prime minister, at 42, since Lord Liverpool came to power in 1812. This involved rising up the ranks of one of the most challenging organizations in the democratic world, and shining in a succession of offices where he impressed civil servants and ministers alike. Let’s not forget, in the current excess of despondency, that his two years in office include some notable successes, not least restoring order after the Liz Truss catastrophe and negotiating an agreement with the European Union over trading relations with Northern Ireland.

Sunak also made a succession of judgment calls that secured his long-term success. He arrived in parliament as a committed Brexiteer, annoying Cameron but aligning him with the party’s soul. He was one of the first big beasts to back Johnson for the leadership, putting him at the heart of an administration that, for all its faults, won an 80-seat majority in December 2019. Even his seesawing between left and right can be justified in purely political terms: Having lost the party leadership to Truss on the basis of the votes of party members, he calculated that he needed to consolidate support rather than antagonize the right.

Devoid of charisma and vision? That is surely a feature not a bug. Johnson had a surfeit of charisma — always the center of attention but utterly incapable of running anything. Truss had plenty of vision but no common sense: She saw Britain transformed into a free-trading entrepot through the magic of unfunded tax cuts. Sunak’s job was to clean up the mess left by both. His robotic focus on delivering his “five promises” may now grate with the public, but it was a necessary antidote to the wild talk of his predecessors’ years.

The problem with Sunak is not that he lacks political skills; it’s that his skills only make sense within the context of the Conservative Party. His support for Brexit put him on the right side of history when it came to rising within the Conservative ranks. But it also condemned him to supporting a policy that shrank Britain’s economy and fractured its politics. His compulsive balancing of right-wing and left-wing policies — Rwanda for the right, and Cameron for the left — makes sense when it comes to preventing the party from falling apart. But it becomes impossible to delivering a coherent governing philosophy.

Indeed, the Tories are not so much an organized party as a collection of warring tribes. Libertarians want to cut the state and unleash the free market. Blue-collar conservatives want to recreate the 1950s, or at least an imagined version of the 1950s, with high-paying working-class jobs and an end to wokery. One Nation Tories want to make the Tories nice again. The tribes are even divided among themselves: The libertarians are divided between Reaganites, who think you can cut taxes without cutting spending, and Thatcherites, who think that you have to cut spending first.

The Brexit saga not only shattered the party but also made it impossible to be put back together. Brexit drove a whole generation of able “Remainers,” such as David Gauke and Nick Boles, to flee the Tories. (The flight continues: The past fortnight has seen two Tory MPs, Dan Poulter and Natalie Elphicke, switch to Labour.) It persuaded a generation of right-wingers that the road to success is through bullying and braggadocio. It raised expectations that it was incapable of fulfilling. The Johnson coalition of traditional Tories and working-class Brexiteers is crumbing largely because leaving the EU has reduced Britain’s growth rate rather than created opportunities.

Sunak is thus a symptom rather than a cause — as good a politician as you can get while the Conservatives are in power but a dud nevertheless. He is merely part of a long line of failed prime ministers. The problem is not with him but with the party that he leads. That’s why the Tories can’t find anybody to take his place despite polls (and now local election results) suggesting that they’re heading for a worse electoral defeat than in 1997.

So it’s not that Rishi Sunak is bad at his job — he’s almost certainly better than any of his potential replacements. The problem is that his job is leading the Conservative Party.