Good morning. After Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and New Year, the last great festival of the season: Rishi Sunak’s five pledges anniversary day. The prime minister is marking the occasion with a trip to the east Midlands, while Keir Starmer is making a speech in which he will promise to lift the mood of “a downtrodden country”. Personally, I’ll be saying a prayer to the god of setting your own homework, and another to the god of unfulfilled ambition.
When Sunak came up with this device exactly a year ago, it was generally viewed as a smart rhetorical move: in several cases, he appeared to have dressed the central expectations of most experts in language that could make it look as if he was responsible for their achievement. He said there were “no tricks”, and that “we’re either delivering for you or we’re not.” But there were, in fact, tricks: the criteria were slippery, and the timelines were ambiguous. Everything seemed set up for the prime minister to set the terms of the debate and declare victory in time for the next election campaign.
