This week in Brexitland, March 14, 2024

Why Rishi Sunak’s political career is now over - through a combination of hubris, naivety, bad strategy and of course, Brexit

Rishi Sunak’s premiership is finished in all but the most technical sense. Whether the Rwanda Bill passes (and it almost certainly will) and whether any flights get off the ground, it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Whether England wins the Euros in the summer, also doesn’t matter in terms of Sunak’s political career. It is over. Everyone knows it, but a few people will find it necessary to pretend otherwise for a little while longer.

How did it go so wrong for him? How did a guy known at one point as “Dishy Rishi”, someone at least somewhat liked and admired across the political spectrum, become such a reviled PM? It’s been a combination of things.

One is a hubristic naivety, mostly born out of a lack of experience, both in terms of Sunak himself as well as the team around him. They seemed to not understand the enormity of the problems they were going to have to deal with, both in terms of the Conservative party internally and the country at large. I know I’ve talked about it many times before, but giving Suella Braverman back the Home Office was a key part of why Sunak’s premiership was sunk even before it started. He wanted to try and be the “sensible one”, the clever clog who was going to come in and mop up the mess left by Truss and Johnson - except, he never understood that he couldn’t possibly do that and keep those who thought Truss and/or Johnson should still be in charge of the party on side. It’s like Team Sunak thought giving Braverman her old job back would ease tensions within the parliamentary party, instead of what it actually did and was always going to do, stoke up the tensions further, only for no outward gain. At least if Sunak had openly challenged the right of his party, he could have had a shot at establishing the “grown ups are back in charge” narrative - instead, he tried to placate them, destroying his strategy in the process.

Although, coming onto strategy now, it’s hard to discern what Sunak’s has ever been anyhow. He’s presented himself as a change candidate, only to hire David Cameron as foreign secretary, reinforcing for us that Tory rule has been one, unbroken stream of more than a dozen years. He keeps going back to the “I’m the sensible grown up” stuff, only to then veer into shrieking about seven bins and meat tax like a tin foil hat nutter on Facebook. In essence, Sunak has never had a definable political strategy and he desperately needed one, right form the start.

Of course, Brexit is at the heart of this, as always. After all, how can you be the sensible grown up who is going to clean up the mess when you can’t even admit to the biggest horror show, still sat in the middle of the floor, festering. It’s like attempting to clean up a filthy room, touching everything in it apart from the fetid corpse of a moose that is smack dab in the middle of it. Whatever you do, if you don’t deal with the dead moose, the room is never going to be inhabitable, however well you scrub the walls or the bits of the floor not befouled by the bodily fluids of the deceased moose.

Adherence to Brexit means you have to indulge in fantasies, on a constant basis. You have to cheer about pints of wine as if they are a symbol of freedom. You have to describe jobs fairs in Indiana as “trade deals”. You have to convince yourself that talking about Brexit as if it were directly analogous to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 to a group of gobsmacked Yanks isn’t mad. Doing all this stuff means you never get to be the sensible grown up. Sensible grown ups don’t act like that.

If I were Rishi Sunak - or if I were advising him - I’d tell him to drag it all out until after Conservative party conference, wait a couple of weeks, call a press conference that everyone assumes will be the start of the general election campaign - and then resign as PM as well as MP for Richmond. Let the “bastards” in his party deal with that one. I say this knowing Sunak isn’t going to do this, of course. He is probably going to drag it all out until the last moment and then be left holding the bag come January 2025 when the great wipeout occurs. If that happens, he will only have himself to blame.

Thank you for reading. If you haven’t subscribed already, please do so. I’ll be back next week, as ever, with the worst of Brexit.