Rishi Sunak’s first day in office saw him purge his Conservative opponents from government – and damn his predecessors with faint praise. He said Liz Truss had the right idea to improve Britain’s economic growth rate, but she was not up to the job. His message to Boris Johnson was no less brutal. In an artful critique, Mr Sunak said Mr Johnson became Britain’s prime minister – not its president – by winning the 2019 election. The mandate, he pointedly said, was not a personal one, but belongs to “all of us”. Mr Sunak – whose political career appeared stalled, if not over, two months ago – could be excused for gloating. But excessive self-confidence will only harden the resolve of his Commons adversaries.
Ms Truss and Mr Johnson are figures shrunken by events. Yet both remain lightning conductors for dissent. While Mr Johnson tweeted his congratulations to the new prime minister, Ms Truss, in her speech outside Downing Street, showed no sign of contrition for her calamitous time in office. Instead, she doubled down on her argument that cutting taxes was the route to growth, defiantly quoting the Roman philosopher Seneca’s words that “it is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” She signalled that Mr Sunak would be looking for trouble if he were to drop commitments to Brexit “freedoms” and defence spending.
The last two occupants of No 10 were constitutionally important figures. Both were the only prime ministers to have been directly elected by their party’s members. This might have explained why power appeared to go to their heads. Ms Truss could only count on the support of a minority of the parliamentary party. By contrast, Mr Sunak was elected by Tory MPs, with more than half publicly backing him. This affords him some breathing space. Michael Gove, who tormented Ms Truss, is rewarded with a return to what seems a male-heavy cabinet.
The prime minister is wrong to return Dominic Raab to the justice ministry, where his disastrous confrontation with barristers caused the courts to close. And he’s even more wrong to reappoint Suella Braverman as home secretary after she left cabinet because of a security breach. The new government is not so much a reboot as a restoration of an old idea: that government spending ought to be constrained to control inflation. Such thinking will lead to austerity and produce a blend of “private opulence and public squalor”.
The Tories won their parliamentary majority with promises of getting Brexit done, rebuilding the NHS and tackling regional inequality. None of these have been redeemed. Mr Sunak, who has been in government since 2019, is part of the problem. The government spends lots of money, but not necessarily in ways that help voters. On Monday night, ministers secured £11bn extra to cover the Bank of England for losses on bonds it had bought. Tory MPs will find it hard to defend such largesse when public services are being cut and household bills are shooting skywards.
After 12 years in power, the Conservative party is exhausted and mutinous. Loyalty to its leader is contingent on opinion polling. Mr Sunak seems a wooden performer, with policies that will exacerbate the crisis that voters face. Sooner or later, he will face the parliamentary disunity that his election sought to banish, leaving the country once again with a ringside seat at a political circus.
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