Now there are three Rishi Sunaks. None looks a winner

The Conservatives cannot so easily shed the record of the past 13 years

Rishi Sunak has been found out. The prime minister is not very good at being, well, prime minister. His own party has decided he does not look like a winner. So Tory strategists have come up with a wheeze. They have created a new Sunak. Better still, two new Sunaks. 

In the first of these new guises, the prime minister is cast as a man of the people. You know, a kitchen table sort of chap, the son of a pharmacist, ever alert to the pressures on family budgets and attuned to the everyday concerns of middle-of-the-road Britain. This Sunak likes to be filmed on factory floors, at filling stations and beer festivals.

Sunak number three is a different creature, a populist champion of identity politics. This prime minister might not have chosen precisely the same words as his deputy party chair Lee Anderson, but he agrees that cross channel asylum seekers should “Fuck off back to France”. As for the “eco-terrorists” campaigning against global warming, red wall Sunak is on the side of cash-strapped owners of ancient diesels. 

We have been here before. When John Major’s government crashed to defeat at the hand of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997, the Conservatives decided that the problem was they had not been right-wing enough. So they chose as leader the 37-year-old William Hague, a tax-cutting Eurosceptic, over the political big beast but determined centrist Kenneth Clarke.

Hague, who had made his name as a schoolboy admirer of Margaret Thatcher at the 1977 Conservative party conference, struggled to broaden his appeal. Party apparatchiks duly gave him a makeover. Hague, who looked still younger than his age, was told to boast he drank 14 pints of beer a day as a teenager. He was handed a baseball cap and sent off to the Notting Hill carnival. The voters were unimpressed, and the Tories crashed to a second defeat. 

Such was their relief after emerging from last year’s Downing Street psychodramas, the latest generation of Tory strategists initially thought it enough that Sunak was neither Boris Johnson nor Liz Truss, the former a habitual liar, the latter prone to barminess. Sane Sunak would do the trick.

This Sunak, an honest fellow who knows how to add up, had the virtue of seeming to be in character. The prime minister is indeed a technocratic problem solver - though one with views instinctively closer to the political right than the centre. The mistake last autumn was to think the country would forget, forgive and applaud the Tories’ return to a semblance of sanity. The mistake now is to think the answer is to reinvent the prime minister. 

The problem with Sunak as the chap next door is that he is not. Putting aside family wealth - the Sunaks were building a home swimming pool complex while most were struggling to pay their heating bills - he lacks empathy.

Put him in a room with, say, health service or warehouse workers and he stands out - and not just because of the curious mix of sixth form looks and expensively fashionable suits. Send him to fill up his car, and he has to borrow a suitably modest model from a filling station employee and then shows he does not know how to use a bank card. As for holding up a pint at the beer festival, he does not drink alcohol. 

Recasting Sunak as a pocket-sized Ron de Santis runs into a different problem. Drawing dividing lines in the culture wars does appeal to a segment of the population, even if few are likely to believe the Tory charge that Labour leader Keir Starmer is in league with the people traffickers who send the small boats across the channel. Doubtless there are also a few who think that the most pressing danger facing Britain is respect for gender diversity.

Most voters have other things on their minds: falling living standards, higher mortgage rates, record NHS waiting times, a broken criminal justice system, fractured rail and postal services, crumbling schools, rivers full of sewage. That’s before you get to the self-harm, economic and political, inflicted by Brexit. The inescapable fact is that the Conservatives have been in power for 13 years. The dismal record cannot be wished away by promising to legislate for single sex lavatories.

As for the prime minister’s personality, Sunak’s problem is that he is Sunak. By all accounts a competent manager, but a leader bereft of an organising mission and of an emotional connection with the country. Inventing more Sunaks will not help.