Here are two snapshots of Rishi Sunak. Which sounds more plausible to you?
The first presents a leader who is “up for a fight”, “fizzing with ideas” and “ready to take the gloves off”. It’s the one briefed by his aides, who have incentives, if not necessarily reasons, to be cheerful.
The second portrays a man who tries to do everything, prefers spreadsheets to strategy, and buries himself in detail. It’s that sketched by others, some of whom have motives, not always disclosed, for going negative.
So which is it? Neither? Both? Near the start of the parliamentary year, I asked whether “this systematic, tidy ex-hedge fund manager [will] find it hard to bear patiently with the media’s desire for sensation, the frailties of his colleagues, and the tiny attention span of modern politics”.
“My worry is that, as the media and Labour try to pick Ministers off by one…Sunak retreats into himself, and becomes a prisoner of his virtues, disdaining the short-termism of so much political discourse. Sticking to the plan shrinks to micro-managing more; doing the right thing to bowing to conventional wisdom”.
This Dowing Street is less leaky than many, so the truth is obscured by discretion. It’s also clouded by the Prime Minister’s decision, taken near the start of his premiership, not to tell a story about himself – about what he believes the challenges facing Britain are and how his Government intends to meet them.
This may have appealed to his psychology, but the decision was grounded in politics. The doctrine according to Isaac Levido, who is set to manage the Conservative election campaign, was that voters were fed up with the Tories, and didn’t want to hear from them.
So the best course that Sunak could take was to find voters’ priorities, echo them, and try to act on them. Hence the five pledges. But targets may matter less than atmosphere – even if the Prime Minister hits his targets, which as I write seems unlikely.
There comes a point in the electoral cycle when voters have simply had enough – and their cry is “kindly leave the stage”. Every bit of good news, such as the sensational upgrading of Britain’s post-Covid growth figures, is met by quibbles and qualifications that, for some reason, never greeted the bad.
Meanwhile, each bit of the last gathers symbolic weight. Each compromised school roof becomes a metaphor for sagging government, as Ministers cast around to find out how many schools are affected, and voters ask why they don’t know and didn’t act earlier.
If voters are retired, they may be protected from economic turbulence – relatively speaking – but detest culture change. If they’re of working age, they may be more relaxed about the latter but more exposed to the former. Covid, Ukraine; we all know the context, but electoral patience is running low.
Sunak has no electoral mandate of his own from voters. He was rejected by Conservative activists last summer. While handing out taxpayers’ money during Covid, he topped this site’s Cabinet League Table. Since then, he has taken some of it back again, taking the tax burden towards record levels.
In current circumstances, Party activists, Tory members and others may discount it remaining nonetheless “below the average across other advanced economies”, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. At any rate, our table now sees the Prime Minister moving in and out of negative ratings.
If Sunak is not to rely on negative campaigning alone – and voters’ residual doubts about Keir Starmer and Long Corbyn – he has four moments during which to seize voter attention (or rather to try to, given today’s refractive media) before the rolling general election campaign obscures everything else.
The first has gone: the mini-reshuffle that saw Ben Wallace depart. The third comes in November: the new session. The second is set to take place before it: the reshuffle proper. That leaves the event between Charles III’s first King’s speech and this week’s return of Parliament: the Conservative Party conference.
Sunak’s address to it will give him less bang for his buck than before the age of fractured viewing. But he must strive to do what to date he hasn’t done and knows he needs to do: to project a sense of purpose – like Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, the biggest election-winners of the last 50 years.
He’ll be assisted by a team whose ups and downs are being chronicled. But the reports may miss a key point about its make-up. What counts most isn’t the depature of an Amber de Botton or the arrival of a Jamie Njoku-Goodwin.
Rather, it’s the absence of a Steve Hilton at the court of David Cameron – and more pertinently, a George Osborne – or a Dominic Cummings at that of Boris Johnson. In other words, the gap where a political strategist, even a visionary, should be.
Mind you, such figures take a leader only so far. The Prime Minister could proclaim a plan in Manchester to truly take back control: to wrest power back from the Thing, the Ascendancy, the Establishment, Big Everything – whatever you like to call it.
He could present himself as the moderate man who’s had enough – of cartel capitalists, change-resistant public services, quangocrats, regulators, government-funded lobbyists and expanding judicial review. But if his words were to cut through, he’d have to mean it.
It would be more in character for Sunak to deliver an upbeat speech about tech, science and new opportunities. Whether people would relate to it is questionable. At any rate he could do worse than be upfront about his wealth: after all, he’s scarcely in politics to make money. He doesn’t need it. Voters might take the point.
Mario Cuomo, the three-time Governor of New York, said that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Such is conventional wisdom, but I wonder if it’s right. Successful leaders need a touch of poetry in season or out of season – or at least to explain that they don’t have it, and that delivery will always trump dreams.
The Prime Minister is the Spreadsheet King, but inspiration is another country. No-one will work harder for Britain; few politicians have a back story, with its stress on family, enterprise and work, as authentically conservative.
But you can be a thoroughly conventional, deeply religious, hard-driven meritocrat – all of which Sunak undoubtedly is – yet not be a politician. Is he one? (This site asked, earlier this year.)
Either way, Sunak has cut Labour’s poll lead from 27 points when he arrived in Downing Street to 18. That’s not nearly enough. He may have little more than nine months to persuade voters to trust him with a fifth Tory term.
“Where does the power come from?” asks Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, and answers: “From within”.
