Ministers may find it difficult to deliver on Rishi Sunak’s five “detailed pledges”, a cabinet member has indicated, after senior Conservatives publicly criticised the prime minister’s ability to lead.
The energy secretary, Grant Shapps, said the Conservative government was “still absolutely committed” to delivering all five of Sunak’s promises within this parliament, but people must “wait until the end of that trajectory” to judge the prime minister’s progress.
In January, Sunak pleaded with the public to judge him on fulfilling his pledges, none of which have a timescale apart from halving inflation by the end of 2023. His pledges also include growing the economy, reducing debt, cutting NHS waiting lists and stopping small-boat crossings to the UK.
NHS waiting lists remain at a record high, while economic growth remains slow, and 564 asylum seekers crossed the Channel this week alone.
Shapps told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme: “I thought it was always going to be difficult, and we still are committed absolutely to those five pledges.”
He added: “In fact the economy is growing, albeit slowly, so there is some movement there. We want to make sure we do get the NHS waiting list down and we’ve seen an end to 18-month waits for example, and when it comes to stopping the boats, we’re passing the laws to do it.”
Sunak failed to impress in his first electoral test, as he oversaw devastating losses at the local elections, with the Tories losing more than 1,000 councillors. Some traditional Conservative votes have since admitted they wanted to make the Tories wake up, “stop being wishy-washy” and earn their votes back.
The former home secretary Priti Patel accused Sunak of overseeing a “managed decline” of the Conservative party, and claimed the prime minister “would be more in touch with the people and with our values” if he spent more time with the grassroots of the party, when she spoke at the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) conference on Saturday.
Rejecting Patel’s criticisms, Shapps claimed the Conservative party always managed to “renew itself with ideas” and said it was great that colleagues gathered at various conferences “buzzing with energy and new ideas”, but that the mood in the party was one of “steely optimism”.
“We still have more councillors in place than they [Labour’s Blair/Brown governments] would have done during the same point of the electoral cycle,” he told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme.
“So this idea that there’s something written in the stars, that somehow we cannot come back and win from our particular position at the moment, I completely and fundamentally disagree with … Rishi Sunak actually has stabilised the party.”
He later added: “I think we’ve got the ideas, but also the practical solutions – not to say, there aren’t many challenges along the way. I think that the mood is one of steely determination, I think … We know that there’s a job to do, that we’re on the side of the British people.”
The shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said the Conservative party looked “quite demoralised and full of internal politics”.
“What we saw in those local elections was the Conservative party rejected and people choosing Labour over the Conservatives, but we know we’ve got more to do,” he added.
The pro-Boris Johnson CDO conference in Bournemouth also featured speeches from allies of the former prime minister, including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries.
Dorries, the former culture secretary and one of Johnson’s biggest supporters, told the conference that the party had undergone an “astonishing political tumble” since Johnson secured an 80-strong majority in 2019, and was “going backwards”.
“We are drifting and people know that,” she said. “They can sense it and they can smell it. We no longer have that inspirational leader and those visionary policies. What happened to levelling up? It’s been all but dumped … a U-turn on the promised bonfire of EU regulation, which in itself demonstrates a paucity of ambition.”
Speaking on Sky News, Rees-Mogg said: “The Tory party would be toast if we change leader again … but that doesn’t mean we agree with [Sunak] on every policy.”
