The honeymoon is over for Rishi Sunak's faltering premiership

After Johnson and Truss expectations were low. Sunak has met them.

The disgraced Boris Johnson has fixed his place in history. Liz Truss lays claim to an asterisk. Rishi Sunak promised a fresh start. Posterity will more likely view his premiership as an interlude.

Sunak’s arrival in Downing Street last autumn was greeted, if not with great enthusiasm, then with palpable relief in the corridors of power. Britain again had a leader who mostly told the truth. He eschewed the deluded ideology of the political right. Britain could not dream itself back to economic success and tax cuts could not be plucked from a magic moneytree.

Whitehall officials accustomed to Johnson’s mendacity and Truss’s belligerent barminess were gushing. Sunak, they volunteered, was diligent and intelligent. He actually read his official papers and, what’s more, was open to advice. Where his predecessors had delighted in their own ignorance as they lurched from one calamity to the next, he had restored deliberation to decision making.

Much was made of Sunak’s preference for confronting one issue at a time. He wanted to check the spreadsheets, test the evidence. Only when he had mastered the intricacies of, say, European Union customs procedures, was he ready to strike a deal with Brussels to end the dispute about post-Brexit trading arrangements for Northern Ireland.

The plaudits did not end there. Diplomats reported that Sunak was conspicuously conciliatory in his dealings with overseas leaders. The mendacity and bluster of his predecessors blew up Britain’s important relationships. Sunak set about repairing them. A cross channel thaw in the wake of the Northern Ireland protocol deal earned a visit to Joe Biden’s White House.

And now? Sunak is discovering that not being Johnson or Truss is not, well, enough. The economy is locked into low growth and high inflation. Living standards are falling. Public services - from the National Health Service to the railways, and the Inland Revenue to the immigration service, are in an advanced state of dilapidation. Rivers are awash with raw sewage. Schools are falling down. Britain does not work.

The government is as unpopular as it has ever been. The opinion polls point to a landslide general election victory for Labour’s Keir Starmer. Tory MPs have been voting with their feet by announcing they do not intend to stand at the election due by January 2025.  Home Secretary Suella Braverman is planning a post-election leadership bid from the wilder fringes of the populist right.

Sunak is bereft of answers. A random set of pledges - from cutting the inflation rate to “stopping the boats” carrying asylum seekers crossing the channel - were calculated to grab voters’ attention and appease his party’s English nationalists. They say nothing about a broader strategy to lift the nation out of its present mess. Leadership is about priorities. It is also about making connections. 

Britain’s problems - from the deep-seated weaknesses of the economy, crumbling public infrastructure and the heavy costs imposed by Brexit - are interlocking. You cannot fix the economy without addressing the decay of the public realm. Higher growth demands rising productivity. That in turn requires more investment. Investment depends on good relations with the EU. It also requires more spending on education and training. And what’s the purpose of training more doctors when dismal pay and conditions in the NHS soon drive them out.

Insiders who once saw Sunak’s issue-by-issue approach to government as a strength now see it as a weakness. He lacks political imagination. Spreadsheet politics militates against vital trade-offs and compromises, and allows trivial issues to obscure the bigger picture. In Sunak’s case it also betrays the absence of anything resembling a guiding political purpose. All the while, he remains in thrall to the English nationalists - witness the ugly pretence that the way to deal with asylum seekers is to send them to Rwanda.

In place of a prospectus, the prime minister has a set of impulses. Nor is there much sign of political courage. To the contrary. Sunak made great play of his claim to political honesty. Yet integrity has its limits. When the House of Commons held Johnson to account for his serial mendacity, the prime minister absented himself. MPs, he protested feebly, should make their own judgement about the behaviour of the former prime minister. Upholding the principle of truth-telling, it seems, was not worth inviting the political ire of Johnson’s cronies.

Sunak’s allies, of course, protest that he was dealt a terrible hand. Truss had crashed the economy, Britain’s international standing was at an all-time low. The Tories were in a state of civil war. All true. And all the more reason why a politician of stature and conviction would have taken risks. Rehearsing in advance the excuses for an expected electoral defeat will not secure Sunak’s reputation. After Johnson and Truss expectations were understandably low. The prime minister has met them.