“I just want the election over and done with,” said one glum Tory MP at a Westminster garden party. “At least it would put us out of our misery. I’m trying to find someone to talk to about opportunities after parliament”
When the technocratic Sunak became prime minister last October, he promised his party and the country a fresh start. Beleaguered Tory MPs hoped that, at the very least, he would staunch the damage and narrow the gap with Labour. Some even held out a distant hope of recovering to win a fifth successive term in office for the Conservatives.
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss at a hustings event in London in 2022 during their contest for the leadership of the Conservative party. Truss won and managed to crash the economy in her 49 days as prime minister. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA But the danger for Sunak is that the economic outlook, coupled with opinion polls typically putting the Tories 20 points behind the Labour opposition, create a toxic atmosphere in which defeat seems inevitable, discipline breaks down and every scandal adds to a sense of a government decaying in office.
The blunt-speaking Australian strategist, according to those in Sunak’s inner circle, believes that the prime minister is the party’s greatest asset, but he can only win if his MPs show some discipline, stop arguing with each other and get in behind him. The prime minister views himself as a problem solver, devoting himself to data and detailed meetings with officials, fixing issues such as the toxic post-Brexit status of Northern Ireland or trying to curb cross-channel irregular migration or the staffing crisis in the National Health Service.
The prime minister’s supposedly easily achievable promise to halve inflation to 5.4 per cent by the end of the year is – as chancellor Jeremy Hunt said in a Financial Times interview last week – “going to be more challenging than we thought”. The problem for Sunak is that even if he were able to meet his five promises, they are the tests that he himself has chosen to be judged on: they are not necessarily the tests that voters, fatigued after years of static or falling living standards and crumbling public services, will apply.
If Sunak is to follow Levido’s “narrow path” to the summit of another Tory electoral victory, most things have to go right. But for now, to the prime minister’s growing frustration, most things seem to be going wrong.For all the acrimony surrounding Boris Johnson’s defenestration from parliament last month, it was a grim set of inflation data at around the same time that really spooked Conservative MPs. Markets took fright and mortgage rates spiked, amid fears of big interest rate rises to come.
Johnson and Truss have been happy to advise Sunak to start cutting taxes to boost growth while a New Conservative pressure group wants the prime minister to cut net legal migration from 606,000 to 240,000 in 2024. To secure his 80-seat majority in 2019, Johnson built a remarkable Tory coalition of traditional wealthy Tory voters in the south and working class, pro-Brexit voters in the north and Midlands. Many Tory 2019-ers representing “red wall” seats want Sunak to fight the next election on issues that they believe resonate with former Labour voters.
But Tory infighting at Westminster and the ominous economic backdrop have sapped Sunak’s authority at home. Tory activists who yearn for big Truss-style tax cuts – despite recent evidence to suggest that the markets will not wear them – are frustrated by the prime minister’s fiscal discipline.
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