The slow and sudden death of Britain's Conservatives

Rishi Sunak is a prime minister without a compass. Getting rid of him would not save the Tories

Things happen slowly and then all of a sudden, the Hemingway character famously observes. So it has been for Britain’s Conservatives. Tory MPs were painfully slow to accept that Rishi Sunak is a hopeless prime minister. Now, in a state of advanced panic, they are considering throwing him overboard. A new leader, they delude themselves, would make the difference between a poor and a calamitous defeat at the general election due by next January.

There are many ways to describe the sorry condition of Britain. Falling living standards, depressed trade and investment, a health service in permanent crisis, rising crime, broken railways, public services that have simply stopped working. Where else in the Europe from which Britain has wilfully cut itself off would the tax authority plead it can no longer afford to answer taxpayers’ telephone  calls?

The truly searing metaphor for this national decline, though, is found in the condition of its waterways. The other day student rowers from Oxford and Cambridge battled it out in their celebrated annual race on a stretch of the river Thames in west London. Before climbing into their boats they were issued with a health warning. Avoid falling into the river. The water, they were told, was teeming with E Coli bacteria from the raw sewage pumped in by the country’s largest water company.

Britain is proud of its countryside. Or was. The rivers that meander through the hills, forests and fields now overflow with untreated effluent discharged by private water companies. Residents of chocolate box villages can no long wade or fish in their local streams.  Along the nation’s coastlines, beaches and coastal waters are declared too dangerous for swimmers and surfers

The despoilation has been happening in slow motion throughout the 14 years the Conservatives have been in office. The water companies have diverted resources from investment to shareholder dividends. Their greed is explicable, ministerial contempt for the impact on the environment less so. The companies have been breaking the law. The government has cut funding for the agency responsible for enforcement.

Sunak got the premiership because, unlike Boris Johnson, he is not a pathological liar and, after the barminess of Liz Truss, he seemed demonstrably hinged. His prospectus was straightforward. He would preside over a competent administration committed to restoring his party’s shredded reputation for probity. It was never enough. 

Whitehall officials will tell you, in inimitable Yes Minister style, that Sunak would make a perfectly decent minister of state for the digital industries. Neatness, diligence and order, his most notable characteristics, do not fill the demand for leadership. 

There is no iron rule that says successful prime ministers need some grand vision for the future. They do need a compass. Sunak has a spread-sheet. Beyond a series of right-leaning impulses - he does not like welfare spending, wants low taxes and prefers America to Europe - there is little sign the prime minister has a destination. 

The result is that decisions - too many of them delayed - bear the imprint of the last person he has spoken to or to the hysteria of his critics on the populist right of his party. The original promise of steady, competent government has made way for a succession of swerves, usually to appease MPs on the right. Populists have been promoted only to turn against him when, inevitably, they prove unfit for office.

As for the promise of integrity, Sunak has just handed a knighthood to a wealthy business leader whose only claim to public recognition is that he has donated £5m to the Conservatives’ election fund.

The defence offered by Sunak’s aides is that he started out with an impossible legacy. Johnson’s lying had destroyed the government’s standing with voters and the manner of his defenestration made the Tory party ungovernable. Truss’s madcap Budget tore down any residual claim the government might have made to economic competence.

On one level they have a point. Historians will record that the Conservatives were doomed by their embrace of English nationalism. Just as the decision to leave the European Union inflicted grave harm on the economy and on Britain’s international standing, so too it fractured the broad coalition that once made the Tories such formidable vote-winners.  What’s left is a series of factions, some of them simply unhinged (they would bring back Johnson or Truss) and others whose nationalism bleeds freely into outright racism.

All that said, Sunak has made his own choices. A small man who seems to become ever smaller, he has thrashed about trying to govern his party. Almost all he has left among a clutch of unfulfilled promises is a tawdry scheme to send cross-channel asylum seekers to camps in Rwanda. The only purpose is to feed the prejudices of the English nationalists. And now it seems Sunak’s shrill promise to “Stop the Boats”  will fail even on its own terms. Far from the threat of rendition to Rwanda deterring refugee crossings from France, the numbers have been rising.

I suppose it is possible that Sunak will indeed be ousted before the election. Backbench Tories now seem to divide between those who have announced they are giving up their seats and those who see an expected dire performance at local elections in May as a moment to choose a new leader. That would make six prime ministers in eight years. The idea that the nation might then change its view is beyond delusional. But then Conservative politics long ago lost touch with reason.

Sunak and his party cannot escape the basic truths. In their fevered embrace of pinched English nationalism, the Conservatives have dragged down the nation and broken themselves. Rishi Sunak started out with an outside chance to staunch the bleeding, but chose party management over national interest. And now, suddenly, the nation is readying itself to throw them all out.