I now think that Rishi Sunak is an even worse prime minister than Boris Johnson. Don’t agree? Here’s my case
When Sunak became PM, I had pause for reflection. What if Sunak turns out to be good at the job, I asked myself? I had been saying for years that if only the Tories could get a decent leader and pursue a reasonably centre-rightish path, ditch all the UKIP rubbish completely, then I might have to think again about whether I would prefer them to continue in government over Labour. On Brexit, neither party is looking to do anything to reverse any part of it, so that’s not a factor here. I felt for a moment that I was forced to give Sunak a genuine chance. After all, he had set himself up as the centrist technocrat who was going to dig in and fix the problems created by his predecessor colleagues, and I have never doubted that he’s a clever man. Maybe he might surprise us all, I thought immediately after he became PM. Rishi could turn out to be a very good prime minister, I was forced to concede, leading the Tories back to poll leads and a genuine hope of winning the next general election.
This period of wonder was extremely short-lived however, because Sunak went and did something so ridiculous, it blew up his premiership before it had really begun. Giving Suella Braverman the Home Office back told us everything we needed to know about Sunak - and he’s done nothing to persuade us otherwise since.
All of the possible reasons for giving Braverman the HO job back damn Sunak completely. Either he thinks she’s the best person for the job in a practical sense, which makes him completely delusional, or he’s put her there for political reasons, all of which fall apart when examined in any detail. If it’s about keeping the right of the party happy, nothing can ever do that, it is not possible to make those people happy. They live to be disgruntled. They are so like the far-leftists they claim to despise, never settling for anything less than some utopia they could never even begin to describe to anyone. So, if that’s the reason, Sunak’s a total fool.
If it’s that he thought she would get the Tories some votes, again, he’s not living in reality. Braverman is immensely unpopular with voters, as every poll on the matter demonstrates, and having her as Home Secretary makes Sunak’s claim to want to bring back sensible, accountable government look ridiculous all on its own.
Finally, if Sunak gave Braverman the Home Secretary job back because she threatened to back Boris Johnson or at least not back Sunak unless he gave her the job, and Sunak was thus worried about not having enough MPs voting for him in order to become PM, that alone would explain a great deal as to why Sunak has been so bad a prime minister. Sunak never seemed to realise that he was the Tories only, last, slight hope and if they were going to mess around and play games with him, he should have just told them, “Make me leader, or I walk away.” They would have panicked had he done that and fallen into line. And if they didn’t, that would have signified that the party was past repairing and Sunak would have been much better off out of it all.
I truly hope Sunak didn’t give Braverman the Home Office back because of some balance of Tory MP votes thing, mostly because that scares me about the level of political incompetence that exists in Downing Street currently. Perhaps it is even worse than I’m imagining, a terrifying thought.
Boris Johnson was an awful prime minister, obviously. He was so mainly because of his inherent laziness and inability to focus on any level of detail. But in a strange way, this is what made Johnson a slightly better PM than Sunak - he didn’t really care about running the country and left it mostly to others to do it for him. Sunak on the other hand seems to overthink absolutely everything and ends up pleasing no one along the way. With Rishi, everything gets quickly tangled in knots and you have no idea what his government is even theoretically attempting to do any longer except vaguely “fix things”, a project that does not appear to be going well.
For the sake of clarity: when I talk about the relative merits of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, I’m discussing what are certainly amongst the worst prime ministers this country has ever had. So, when I say Johnson was a better PM than Sunak, it’s like saying Plan 9 From Outer Space is a slightly better film than The Garbage Pail Kids Movie.
Sunak’s cabinet, something which should be a sign of his credentials, of his getting the Tories back on track after the Johnson/Truss debacle, is probably the worst cabinet since the Conservatives returned to office in 2010. In fact, I believe it’s the worst by some stretch, and May and Johnson did not shine in this department. Let’s take Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister. He was on television yesterday, spouting what I took to be a wild claim. When confronted with the idea that the government could surely “Stop the Boats” if they got on top of processing asylum claims much quicker, Jenrick said, no, in fact, processing the claims faster would encourage more migrants to come. This struck me as one of the most ludicrous things I’d ever heard - until I thought a little bit about what Jenrick had said and realised it was in fact even more ludicrous than I’d at first imagined.
You see, Jenrick’s claim only makes sense if the vast majority of the claims made by asylum seekers are legitimate. Then what Jenrick is saying is that when refugees come to Britain, they will be settled quickly if we speed up the processing time. This will encourage more asylum seekers to come because they’ll be in limbo for a shorter timespan than elsewhere in Europe. The problem with this line of argument is that this government claims the precise opposite is true, always going on about how many bogus asylum seekers there are in the system - all this stuff about “gangsters from Albania” crossing the channel in dinghies. In fact, this is the entire basis for their “Stop the Boats” campaign, the idea that we are being taken advantage of by economic migrants and criminals who are seeking asylum in this country illegally.
You see, if this latter claim is true - if a large number of those coming across the channel are bogus asylum seekers with no legal claim to refuge - then speeding up the processing time will almost certainly act as a massive deterrent to channel crossings. If there are migrants with no right of asylum coming here in droves, if we processed them quickly and then deported them, they would stop coming. Of course they would. So, which is it then, Robert Jenrick? Would processing the asylum claims more quickly encourage migrants to come to Britain because the vast majority of them are entitled to asylum, i.e., most of those coming over in boats are legitimate refugees - or are there loads of people coming here for reasons other than refuge, and thus we should speed up the processing time and deport them?
It’s one or the other and the confusion the government have sown on this isn’t doing them any favours. The whole thing is classic Sunak, in fact: take a strange line on something that makes no logical sense, try and ineptly blame someone else when it all falls to pieces, then watch your poll ratings dip even further when the public in fact blames the government and not the “woke blob” or whatever else you’ve ineptly attempted to use as a diversionary tactic.
We’re at a point now where letting Sunak off the hook for the Tories continuing poll ratings placing them in extinction territory no longer cuts it. Truss was almost a year ago now and we’ve seen no lasting improvement in the Conservative party’s ratings amongst the electorate since. At a certain point, you have to look at Sunak and say he’s not cutting through. I think that time has arrived. I believe people are reacting less now to the aftermath of Truss and more to the fact that we have a government that appears to be hopelessly adrift, making promises it can’t keep, annoying everyone across the political spectrum along the way. Yes, Sunak inherited a mess - but he’s made it worse, not better.
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You make a good case, but worse than Boris? Really? Worse than the PM who rushed us into the NI protocol and then rushed us out of the EU in such a screaming hurry that it's going to take a decade, maybe two decades, to partially undo the gratuitous damage he and Lord Frost did? Worse than the PM who debased almost every part of our constitution, who seems incapable of telling the truth, who made hi-falutin promises and set tight targets on things like electric vehicles, but didn't bother to do any of the hard graft to make it possible to reach those targets?
Sunak lost all credibility when he said Norther Ireland had the best of both worlds, being in the United Kingdom and the Single Market. Probably the biggest insult to a Nation any PM has said.