People who work with him at Number 10 depict Rishi Sunak as a workaholic nerd who is most alive when he’s scrolling through a spreadsheet or burrowing into the appendix of a briefing document. Critics mean it as an insult when they call him “a technocrat”, but he takes it as a compliment.
He has no gift for poetic oratory. Nor any talent for clever wisecracks or sizzling zingers. He can’t do what George HW Bush once called “the vision thing”. The Tory leader thinks of himself as a problem-solver and that’s how he’s been projected to the public since he arrived in Downing Street. Competence and delivery were supposed to be the motifs of his premiership. In his early months in post, Labour people got a bit windy when polling suggested his managerial image had some appeal to voters repelled by the debaucheries of Boris Johnson and the mayhem of Liz Truss.
Here’s the snag. If you are going to market yourself as someone who is good at fixing stuff, you had better be good at fixing stuff. You need to be especially successful at tackling the challenges that you personally identified as mission critical.
It is almost exactly six months since the prime minister produced a to-do list of his “priorities” and asked the country to judge him by them. The most common criticism of his “five pledges” at the time he unveiled them was that he had picked unambitious performance indicators and set goals that seemed like the bare minimum people ought to be able to expect from their government. As it turns out, the critics were wrong, but wrong in a way that does not flatter the prime minister. Mr Sunak has found it anything but easy to hit the targets that he hand-picked. The scorecard currently reads five pledges made, zero pledges fulfilled. On the exam he set for himself, he’s a total fail.
His promise to “stop the small boats” was the most reckless. Migrants continue to cross the Channel in substantial numbers. The only people the government has managed to put on a plane to Rwanda have been the home secretary and her bodyguards. Critics who said the scheme would not just be inhumane but also incredibly costly now have a figure to attach to that charge. The Home Office’s own assessment, which it finally divulged last week, reckons the bill will come in at £169,000 per person deported. The same document also admitted that “it is not possible to estimate” – in other words, we don’t have a clue – whether the scheme will even achieve its stated objective of deterring those desperate enough to hazard their lives crossing the channel. Critics who said sending asylum seekers to east Africa was unlawful can now say their opinion is shared by the appeal court. The only consolation for the government is that voters were already extremely cynical about an oath they did not trust. Before the court ruling, pollsters reported that less than a quarter of the public believe that anyone will ever be sent to Rwanda.
Voters have even less faith that the government can bring down NHS waiting lists, a Sunak pledge that key people at Number 10 regard as vital to their party’s chances of being competitive at the election. The government never entertained any hope of clearing the massive backlog of patients needing treatment, more than 7 million on the latest count. Mr Sunak’s much more meagre ambition was to get the numbers on the waiting list down in time for the election. Here he is in serious trouble.
Since he made that promise, the list has ratcheted up to ever-higher records, a trend that will be hard to arrest for so long as the NHS is convulsed by strikes and suffers from chronic understaffing. According to the government’s workforce plan published on Friday, the health service in England is 112,000 people short of the personnel it needs, a figure that includes more than 8,000 missing doctors and more than 40,000 vacant nursing posts. The recruitment and training drive it is now promising comes far too late to have any impact in the time left before the voters will give their verdict on the Conservative record.
The “number one priority” identified by the prime minister is to halve inflation by the end of this year. Once seen as the most achievable of his pledges, this increasingly looks like one of the most resistant to his desires. Core inflation, which excludes more volatile items such as the cost of fuel, is rising at a faster clip than it was when he made that vow. Worse, this inflation is at its highest in more than three decades. Interest rates will rise to a more elevated level and stay higher for longer than the Tory leader anticipated back in January. Sir Keir Starmer is branding this the “Tory mortgage bombshell”, an echo of the “tax bombshell” tag that the Conservatives stuck on Labour to greatly damaging effect in the run-up to the 1992 election.
For those remortgaging next year, annual repayments are expected to rise by an average of £2,900. The “mortgage catastrophe”, as even some Tory MPs are calling it, is the deadliest of the threats facing their party. It is terrifying Conservative MPs in all geographical locations and of all ideological persuasions because this is a dagger to the heart of their core vote. Current market expectations are that the Bank of England will be able to gradually start trimming interest rates in the back half of next year. Even if this happens – and that’s a very iffy if – it is going to be too late to spare a huge number of people from a lot of pain.
Labour is seizing on the opportunity to feed the belief among many voters that the Tory leader is too out of touch to understand the misery being inflicted on people who don’t enjoy his kind of wealth. At a recent PMQs, Sir Keir mocked the prime minister for having a rose-tinted view of the world because he only sees it “from the vantage point of his helicopter”. Someone on the Labour leader’s gag-writing team is earning their wages.
Persistent inflation and higher interest rates endanger Mr Sunak’s chances of meeting two more of his pledges. National debt is not coming down – it is surging both in cash terms and relative to the size of the economy. It recently hit more than 100% of GDP, the highest level in more than 60 years. This makes it less likely that Jeremy Hunt will have the scope to give scared Tory MPs what they most clamour for, which is some meaningful tax cuts before the election. As for the pledge to “grow the economy”, it is flatlining and higher interest rates increase the probability that we will tip into recession.
Some Tories are casting around for scapegoats. Blame inflation on the Bank of England for letting it get out of control. Blame the failure to produce a workable policy to address cross-Channel migration on obstructive judges. Blame the crisis in the NHS on its staff. This won’t work for them because it just sounds like pathetic responsibility swerving.
The five pledges, originally conceived as a way for the Tories to regain some credibility and trust, have boomeranged on the prime minister. Pollsters report that fewer than one in 10 voters think the government is doing well on reducing inflation, cutting NHS waiting lists, bringing down the national debt or removing asylum seekers who cross the Channel. Mr Sunak’s personal approval ratings, which looked quite good in the circumstances when he took over at Number 10, have tumbled into deeply negative territory.
The prime minister hoped to give himself positive definition as a problem-solver. He is instead being defined as a man who can’t even achieve the goals he set for himself. There is no plan B available to him. Having staked the reputation of his premiership on these vows, he has no choice but to pray that his score will be better than nil out of five by the time of the election. Yet even if he gets very lucky and somehow manages to claw his way to five out of five before he has to face the country, he shouldn’t expect to be congratulated. Millions will still be stuck on NHS waiting lists and millions more will have suffered a colossal crunch to their living standards.
At the beginning of the year, Mr Sunak promised he would bring people “peace of mind”. That’s another of Mr Fix-It’s pledges that have come completely unstuck.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
