The Political Suicide of Rishi Sunak

Our floundering prime minister has looked at what it would take to win the election - then done the exact opposite.

I come from a politically aware - and often politically active - family, so I’ve paid fairly close attention to the British government since I was old enough to understand what a government actually is. The first general election I was really aware of was in 1979. I was nine years old and it was very obvious, even at that age, that the country was in dire straits. We lived in Kilmarnock at the time, and every couple of weeks we’d all squeeze into my dad’s Ford Capri and make the 20-mile trip to Glasgow for whatever we needed that Kilmarnock’s shops didn’t have.

Glasgow in early 1979 was not a pretty sight. The bin men had been on strike for months, so uncollected rubbish was piled in the streets. The country just didn’t work anymore. Clearly, something needed to be changed - and it was. That May, Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister. Love her or hate her, you can’t deny that she changed things. The unions learned that they don’t have an automatic right to be involved in government decisions. Fat, complacent industries learned that if you can’t compete, you can’t survive. And South American fascists in comic opera uniforms learned that, when Britain has strong leadership, it can’t be pushed around.

Now it’s 2023 and, again, this country just doesn’t work anymore. The ways in which it doesn’t work are different, and perhaps more complicated, but there’s the same sense of things just grinding to a halt through incompetence and apathy. Now, as then, our government is in thrall to a failed consensus and doesn’t have the energy or wit to disentangle itself. In 1979 the consensus was that the country should be run by the Trade Unions Congress and the Confederation of British Industry meeting in smoke-filled rooms to decide what was going to happen, with the government acting as mediators. Now, the consensus is that multiculturalism is a jolly good idea and the country should be run by disinterested technocrats who’re so much smarter than those awful voters. Technocrats like this man:

The consensus that nearly destroyed the country in 1979 and the one that’s destroying it now share a core belief: That it doesn’t really matter what the voters want. The thing is, as we all discovered on 24 June 2016 when it turned out that a puppy is for life but our EU membership was not, the voters do have power - and, every so often, they get angry enough to use it. Rishi Sunak seems to have forgotten this.

Rejecting Your Voters Isn’t The Way To Win

There’s something else Sunak seems to have forgotten - and his oversight is likely to doom him. Like any country with two main political parties, the UK has an element of political tribalism. There are Tories who identify with the Conservative Party so strongly that they’d still vote for it if it was led by Adolf Eichmann, and on the other side of the fence there are socialists who identify so strongly with the Labour Party they’d still vote for it if it was led by… well, by Jeremy Corbyn. It between, though, there are larger numbers of people who identify with one of the parties but have clear limits on what they’ll tolerate from it, as well as the true floating voters who decide from election to election who they’re going to vote for. Floating voters are why Labour and the Tories take turns at running the country. “Soft” tribalists - the ones who usually support one party but are willing to think again if that party drifts too far from their own views - are why occasional landslides happen.

In December 2019 Boris Johnson won a landslide. He did this by building a coalition that, as well as tribal Tories, brought in enough floating voters and soft tribal Labour voters to gain an 80-seat majority. Labour had managed to alienate many of its traditional supporters on two fronts - Corbyn’s extremist views, and the refusal of many more moderate Labour politicians (including Keir Starmer) to accept the result of the Brexit referendum. Boris was centrist and unthreatening on economic issues, but more solidly right-wing on cultural ones like Brexit and immigration. In fact once he got elected he turned out to be centrist on those too, but the promise of a more “populist” agenda got him elected.

Rishi Sunak either doesn’t want to hold Boris’s winning coalition together, which assuming he actually wants to win the next election makes no sense at all, or he doesn’t understand what it was based on. What Boris understood, but Sunak apparently doesn’t, is that overall - and of course there are many exceptions - the British people tend to lean left on economics and right on culture. We like the NHS and welfare state, but we also like strong border controls and crime-free streets. And of course we like politicians who listen to us, and give us what we vote for.

So where are we now? Well, immigration - both legal and illegal - is out of control despite thirteen years of Conservative governments who got elected after promising to reduce it. Instead, immigration is the highest it’s ever been by a huge margin. The latest polling shows that 60% of us think it’s been too high over the last ten years; just 9% think it’s been too low. When it comes to the effects of that immigration 36% think it’s been mostly bad for the country, 32% think it’s a mix of good and bad, and an underwhelming 24% think it’s been mostly good. It’s clear that most of us want immigration reduced. A week ago Sunak sacked Suella Braverman, the one person in his cabinet who seemed determined to secure our borders and deal with the consequences of allowing in millions of people from very different cultures. Although he claims he’s determined to stop illegal migration across the Channel, according to Braverman’s incendiary post-sacking letter he’s refused to take any of the steps needed to actually do that. And now we find that he’s considering an amnesty for hundreds of thousands who have already arrived here illegally. Meanwhile the government has done nothing at all to reduce legal immigration. Sunak isn’t even talking about doing that.

Then there’s Brexit. In 2016 we voted to leave the EU. Seven years after that vote, and almost four years after we actually left, Northern Ireland - part of the UK - is still inside the jurisdiction of the EU’s courts and there are customs posts, run by the EU, between parts of the UK. Meanwhile, under Sunak, the government has steadily scaled down its plans to revise and, where possible, eliminate the thousands of EU laws that are still in effect here. It’s obvious that, while paying lip service to Brexit, Sunak has no intention of actually making use of the freedoms it has restored to us.

Finally, to add insult to injury, David Cameron is now back in the cabinet as Foreign Secretary. Because he isn’t even an MP anymore he had to be ennobled to take the job, so he’s now Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton. I honestly have no idea what Sunak was thinking here. Cameron might be a hero to the wet wing of the Tory party, the soft-on-crime remainers who would seem more at home in the Liberal Democrats, but among Boris’s 2019 coalition he’s not popular at all. He’s widely hated for the “austerity” policies of his time in Number 10. At the same time he’s despised for calling the Brexit referendum, campaigning for Remain then resigning as soon as the results came in.

Sunak Has Already Failed

In a country that leans left economically and right socially. Sunak has tried to boost his popularity by bringing back an unpopular former PM who has exactly the opposite inclinations. How on Earth was this supposed to work?

And of course it hasn’t worked. On 12 November, the day before the reshuffle that removed Braverman and brought back Cameron, polls showed the Conservatives on an average of 24% support. On 14 November it had fallen to 23% - and if you actually look at the graph you’ll see a sharp downwards turn. One poll showed the Tories on just 19%. Sunak’s reshuffle has clearly failed - and with Reform up 2% in the same period, it’s not hard to work out where their support is ebbing away to.

The Conservative Party has often been called the most successful election-winning machine in history. It’s built that reputation by knowing which way to lean at any given point in time. When economic issues are what’s concerning the electorate most it focuses on those and tends to adopt more centrist policies. When social issues predominate it turns its guns in that direction and moves to the right. Sunak has turned that wisdom on its head. With immigration at shocking, unsustainable levels and the Middle East’s violence spilling out onto our streets, he’s firmly turned away from the right of his own party and raised his flag on the “middle ground” of the discredited Cameron era. If the Conservative Party wants to salvage anything at all from next year’s election, Rishi Sunak has to go - and this time the party’s members, not its MPs, must choose the new leader.