Where’s Rishi? Even when the prime minister isn’t high above the ground in a plane to Japan, as he was last week, or in a helicopter to Southampton, as he was the week before, he still has a strange air of detachment about him. He doesn’t pay much regard to the day-to-day news cycle. He doesn’t even bother seeming too involved in the big rows that blow up in his own government, often appearing more of a commentator who responds later to a big event like a minister resigning, rather than being the great clunking fist who pushes them out.
When talking about net migration figures, he said: “I inherited some numbers,” suggesting someone else was in charge, maybe even some other political party. His response to Dominic Raab quitting was more like a blog reacting to the news, rather than an attempt to seem in control. In fact, he’s sometimes so slow even to offer this kind of comment that, if he were a mere journalist rather than the prime minister, his editor would be phoning him up and asking if copy might be on the way soon.
Last week, his detachment allowed noisier colleagues to get all the attention for their own plans for the Tory party, whether it was Suella Braverman complaining about the problems of high migration figures, or backbenchers pontificating about the sort of things that wind many voters up, like the importance of the “normative” family or the alleged dangers of childcare. By the end of the week, a senior backbencher had inadvertently ended up reminiscing in a television studio about his childhood spent swimming in sewage, a Conservative twist on the Four Yorkshiremen that no one expected (or needed). Sunak was left responding to Braverman’s call for net migration to come down, and his spokespeople trying to clear up the various toxic spills from backbenchers about family values and sewage. Why is the prime minister, so savvy about his media image and presentation, letting this happen?
One theory about Sunak’s detachment runs that the troublemakers, including his own home secretary and two predecessors in Downing Street, are largely making themselves look ridiculous. A Sunak ally observes that “they do seem to keep showing themselves up rather than showing themselves as an alternative: the reaction to most of what’s happened recently has been ‘thank God we’ve got Rishi rather than one of this lot’ ”. Boris Johnson annoyed a lot of MPs by making comments about Brexit in a speech he was paid big money for, rather than in the House of Commons. MPs are rightly precious about the importance of the Commons chamber for real debate – as well as rather envious of the former prime minister’s earning potential. Meanwhile, Liz Truss’s Taiwan intervention is the latest in a list of big moves by that former PM that have left many Tory MPs chuckling to themselves about her lack of self-awareness, to the extent that her closest friend in politics, Thérèse Coffey, observed politely: “Dare I say it, Liz had her time as prime minister.” Braverman is still a potent force in the Conservative party, but her speech at the National Conservatism conference in which she called for migration to come down has wound up Tories in “red wall” seats. Those MPs agree with her on the need to cut net migration, but they aren’t particularly keen for the home secretary to highlight another example of government failure on legal immigration when they are already trying to persuade their constituents to keep the faith that their party really will tackle the even more salient issue of small boats. “We don’t actually need her to give our voters another reason to be disappointed in us,” says one backbencher.
While Sunak’s rivals engage in what Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire described as a “Conservatives’ conspiracy Comic Con”, the prime minister is quietly getting on with delivery. He is using the time saved by not obsessing about a four-hour window in the news cycle to try to meet his five priorities of cutting inflation, expanding the economy, bringing down national debt, cutting NHS waiting lists and stopping the small boats. He has also been working hard on relations with the parliamentary party. His parliamentary private secretary, Craig Williams, is viewed as “incredibly approachable” and helps MPs get their worries heard. The PM has also been holding big garden events in Downing Street and meeting smaller groups of MPs from the 80:20 group of the 80 most marginal seats the party wants to hold on to and 20 new seats it wants to win. This has improved his understanding of what makes MPs tick, and also their own sense that he values them.
A Conservative leader who doesn’t flatter the egos of his party with plenty of attention always finds life harder. However, this hasn’t stopped MPs who attended the 80:20 gatherings from coming away feeling depressed: many of them are trying to come to terms with the fact that Conservative voters effectively lied to them on the doorstep in the local elections campaign, telling them they’d be backing the party, only for the results to show they clearly hadn’t.
What MPs also don’t emerge with from their time with the prime minister is a clear sense of what on earth they’re supposed to be talking about. At this stage in the electoral cycle before the 2015 election, Conservatives had turned into tedious robots parroting the line “long-term economic plan”. Everyone in Westminster was bored stiff with the phrase, which meant it was only just starting to percolate through to the electorate. But this time around, short of listing the “five priorities”, there is no slogan. The policy Sunak seems most enthusiastic about is getting everyone studying maths to 18, which he talks about at the start of every parliamentary term as though he’s a form tutor telling his class it’s time to take their studies seriously. It’s an odd retail offer to an electorate that, as the PM himself acknowledges, hates maths: vote Tory and we’ll make you do maths forever. A long-term maths plan.
Not only does the lack of a clear slogan mean MPs don’t know what to say; they also don’t fully know what their party stands for. An optimistic Sunak fan says: “We’re being drilled to say that there are five pledges, and what they are; the subtext is that we’re getting on with the job and if we do it OK, then we’ll have a right to set out a plan for the future.” There’s not much time left to set that out, though.
And this is the problem with the detachment and quiet approach to the news cycle: even if Sunak’s rivals and critics are embarrassing themselves, they are still Conservatives and still representing the party brand. They are the ones occupying the air time that the prime minister has himself vacated, and which the Downing Street operation has also opened up by not constantly putting ministers on broadcast rounds. The rationale for not putting a minister out every day is that it means they’re not grilled on all kinds of issues where they might create even more news. But the downside is that news programmes still have slots to fill, and they do so with backbenchers who have their own agendas. Within Westminster, it is clear which side each studio guest is on. To most busy viewers who don’t have time to study the many factions of the Tory party, they are all Conservatives offering the party message rather than their own agenda.
Even if the party meets its five priorities, there is a danger that boasting about them will only seem like a taunt to voters whose lives feel different. It is all very well telling people that you’ve cut waiting lists in the NHS, but if they or someone they love were seen much later than they should have been and ended up having a much harder time as a result, then they’re not going to care about the elimination of long waits overall, or about the numbers still on the list. Voters have longer memories than politicos.
When the Westminster narrative had “priced in” the Liberal Democrats’ broken promise on tuition fees by the time the 2015 election swung around, many normal people hadn’t. The same might be true for those whose lives could be starting to improve but who haven’t yet forgiven or forgotten higher mortgage rates, strangling household bills, and months languishing on an NHS waiting list. If that does turn out to be the case, Sunak will be wishing he’d used his time high above the Westminster fray to fly a big banner setting out what he stood for and who he was, not to pretend he had nothing to do with what was going on.
• Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of the Spectator
