Rishi Sunak’s first task on becoming prime minister a year ago was to restore Britain’s status as a country of serious government. Boris Johnson’s wrecking-ball approach to European diplomacy had undermined that reputation. Liz Truss’s adventures in fiscal fantasy incinerated it. It says a lot about the modern Conservatives that Mr Sunak was anointed by MPs without a contest. The restoration of stability depended on keeping grassroots members away from the selection.
Compared with the unhinged image Britain had a year ago, the country looks stable, but stability is not enough when indistinguishable from stagnation. The imposition of budget discipline has appeased financial markets, but it left no capacity for the investment necessary to repair a decaying public realm.
Mr Sunak’s strongest achievement has been negotiating the Windsor framework for addressing Brexit problems in Northern Ireland. But the structural cost of Mr Johnson’s poorly designed Brexit deal remains unaddressed, and no Conservative leader can do anything about that as long as the party is committed to denial of economic reality regarding European markets.
The need to govern within ideological parameters imposed by a radicalised party is a substantial reason why Mr Sunak was unable to capitalise on any leeway voters once gave him. He pitched himself in terms of rupture from a rotten political culture, pledging “professionalism, integrity and accountability at every level”. Making that work in practice would have involved a more explicit repudiation of his predecessors.
The claim to a measured, problem-solving ethos had a ring of authenticity, but Mr Sunak tarnished the image by pandering to the hardline faction of his party and has largely abandoned the practice of serious administration. When a test of integrity came, in the form of a Commons vote on the privileges committee report into Mr Johnson’s deceptions of parliament, the prime minister abstained. That decision is emblematic of the cowardice and weak judgment that makes Mr Sunak incapable of shaking off the burden of a long, toxic incumbency.
Perversely, a policy area where rupture with the recent past is most distinct is one where continuity was an ethical imperative: targets for achieving net zero. History will judge Mr Sunak’s retreat from climate leadership as exceptionally shortsighted. (He may get some credit for engagement with the challenges of artificial intelligence.)
Many of the prime minister’s problems come down to the flimsiness of his inherited mandate. Laying claim to the mantle of authentic change, as he tried to do at the Conservative conference earlier this month, would have been a stretch for any leader. For a former chancellor to excuse himself from responsibility for decisions made by the government he served in is ridiculous.
The implausibility is illuminated by the Covid inquiry, which is exposing the scale of dysfunction in Downing Street during the pandemic. The current prime minister was instrumental in choices – the “eat out to help out” policy, for example – that have aged poorly. (Understandably, he prefers to remind voters about the more creditable furlough scheme.)
Opinion polls and byelection results suggest that voters see Mr Sunak as caretaker leader of a moribund government. That failure was not inevitable, but averting it would have required a meaningful and sustained break from the past. The evidence so far suggests that the prime minister lacks both the courage and the conviction for that task.
