This week in Brexitland, March 16, 2023

Here are three reasons why Sunak might be an even worse prime minister than Boris Johnson

The easiest way to explain the current Tory strategy to try and win the next general election, or at least, not lose it too badly, is this: division. We already have an extremely fractured society, so the Tories want to jump on top of the things that divide us in the hope of scaring enough people into voting Conservative.

I should say off the top that I hate this strategy - in that, even if it worked, I would still loathe it. I feel like politics is at its best when it tries to bring as many people as it can along with it. Consciously stirring the pot when you have been in government for 13 years already and things seem febrile strikes me as deeply irresponsible.

We are constantly told that most people in Britain are worried about the small boats problems and want it solved. What I find odd is, if there is general consensus on this point, why the need for the offensive language? Why the need to talk about 100 million people coming here if the British public already cares deeply about this issue? It strikes me that if people care a lot about this topic as is, there is no need to make exaggerated claims that seem designed to get them to care about it a lot more than they currently do.

It was this week that made me think, for the first time, that perhaps Rishi Sunak is a worse prime minister than even Boris Johnson. Incidentally, if you’d told me in 2018 that there will be three PMs in a row even worse than Theresa May, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible. Coincidentally, here are the three main reasons why I am now seriously considering whether Sunak might be worse at his current job than BoJo:

1. Sunak is the wrong messenger for what the Tories are trying to sell and is failing at being the “centrist” one at the same time

The whole reason Rishi Sunak is the PM in the first place is because, after the Truss disaster, the Conservative party wanted someone who could act as a “safe pair of hands” and would also strongly signal to both the British public and the markets he was just that. Having him try and be Culture Warrior Number Uno is an idiotic thing to then turn around and attempt. You don’t hire the banker in a suit to try and sort things out and then get him to try out his Alex Jones impression in the next breath. Yet that is seemingly the entire basis of the Conservatives’ electoral strategy at present.

Rishi Sunak is an extremely unconvincing culture warrior. Every time he is required to speak on the topic, he looks uncomfortable, like he wants to get it over with. Where he clearly feels he is in his element is in situations which are the exact opposite - speaking on a stage with other world leaders, as a for instance. If the Tories felt they absolutely needed someone who could lead on the culture war issues in a totally confident way, Sunak was possibly their worst choice. Get Lee Anderson in as PM, if this is the strategy. What, you say, but Lee Anderson would be a terrible PM who might screw everything up even worse than it already is? There might be some correlation happening there.

The culture war stuff detracts massively from the “safe pair of hands” narrative at the same time. So, he’s bad at the culture war stuff and he’s bad at the sensible stuff too, which kind of suggests Sunak is bad at everything to do with being PM. At least Johnson could get people’s pulses racing every once in a while with some of his rabble rousing - and I know, what the hell am I doing talking about Boris Johnson in a relatively positive light, but this is what Rishi Sunak has driven me to.

2. Sunak is weak and looks it

One of the things that has been clearly demonstrated over the last couple of weeks is how little discipline there is within the Conservative party now. No one is scared of Sunak, not in the slightest. There is no sense of him fighting to gain control over his party. Straight after his successful press conference with von der Leyen, it all kicked off and hasn’t let up since.

You wonder if he tried to rein in his MPs over the Lineker thing - which, given the Richard Sharp affair, it would have been wise for all of them to have stayed well clear of - or if he let them do whatever they liked, or worse, egged them on to say more. Any of those three options are terrible, the first two because they would demonstrate he has no control, the last that he has no judgement.

Again, at least Johnson was able to keep his parliamentary party mostly in line. I mean, when some of them weren’t getting personally involved in sleaze scandals, but you know what I mean. BoJo got them to accept a customs border down the Irish Sea, for God’s sake, which is weirdly impressive when you think about it. Imagine Sunak doing anything similar. You can’t, can you?

3. What Sunak is doing isn’t working and won’t work

It’s like in CCHQ they have decided that there is a cultural divide in this country, on trans issues, on gay rights, on women’s rights, on Brexit, on immigration, and that everyone who falls perfectly on one side are people who are very likely to vote Tory and on the other, a bunch of people who would never vote Tory no matter what. This is so obviously false and undercuts everything Sunak is doing at the moment.

There are loads of people who are not only Tory voters but part of the traditional Tory base who are relatively liberal on cultural issues. The trans stuff they probably don’t like, but even then, it isn’t what animates their politics. They mostly vote Tory for two reasons. One is that they want lower taxes, as in, they have high incomes and want less of it to go to the government. The second reason they vote Tory is that they think in the normal run of things, the Conservative party are more likely to run the country in a manner that is practical, at least when compared with what Labour might do.

Successful Tory attacks on Labour throughout recent history aptly demonstrate all this. Take 1992. The whole thing was essentially: we know you don’t like us and you’re tired of us and want a new government. But just think for a moment about how much your taxes might go up under a Labour government. Do you really want to take that risk?

Far from assuming that Tory voters are somehow culturally way to the right of Labour voters, the whole thing in 1992 was based on the exact opposite of that - on the idea that there would be a whole group of people who might vote Labour for cultural reasons, but if you could let them think about the economic implications, they might return to the Tory fold. Lots of them clearly did.

Again, and I stress, the current tactic being pursued by the Conservative party is pretty much the exact opposite of the 1992 tactic, coming from a bunch of people who insist at the same time that the next general election will be a repeat of 1992. It’s like the Tories think at least half the country are a bunch of UKIP knuckle draggers and that’s what’s going to save them in the end. They constantly claim that Remainers misunderstand Brexit when the hilarious thing is the extent to which they think the majority vote to leave the EU in 2016 must mean that more half the country are so right-wing as to want a return to the Middle Ages. Just because you wanted Brexit does not mean you are some far-right nut job, and yet this what Tory MPs are simultaneously asserting and refuting.

Rishi Sunak is the one in charge of this messy strategy. Whoever’s idea it is, he’s the one signing it off every day. And whereas with Johnson I at least had a sort of idea why he was doing what he was doing and how it might theoretically work, I can’t do the same with Sunak. It all looks pretty clueless, almost like he’s given up already.

Is Sunak really worse as PM than Johnson? I don’t know, but the fact that I’m even considering it is incredible.

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