Good morning.
Yesterday, Rishi Sunak gathered his cabinet ministers in a retreat at Chequers for an all-day strategy session that was supposed to figure out the scale of the electoral task ahead and how they can turn around their abysmal poll ratings. The local elections in parts of England and all of Northern Ireland are set to take place in three months and a general election is less than two years away. If the Tories wants to win, Sunak has a very large mountain to climb.
Today’s newsletter, with Guardian political correspondent Kiran Stacey, is about the scale of the challenge, and what Sunak thinks he needs to do to meet it.
Five big stories
West Bank | There are concerns over escalating violence after Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians during a West Bank raid, marking the single deadliest day in the territory in decades. Two rockets were fired from Gaza early this morning, and Israel responded with multiple air attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Scotland | Nicola Sturgeon has told the Scottish parliament that Isla Bryson, a transgender woman who was found guilty of raping two women before transitioning, will not be imprisoned in Scotland’s all-female Cornton Vale prison after news the offender had been transferred there on Tuesday before sentencing.
Windrush | Wendy Williams, the head of the inquiry into the Windrush scandal, has expressed disappointment and concern after the home secretary announced that she has dropped three key reform commitments, three years after the recommendations were accepted fully by the government.
Crime | A 61-year-old man from Leyland in Lancashire has been charged with assaulting the former health secretary, Matt Hancock, on public transport in London.
Media | BuzzFeed has said that it will be using technology from ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence firm, Open AI, to personalise and enhance its online quizzes and content. The media company announced last month it would cut about 12% of its workforce to bring down costs.
In depth: ‘Talk to Tory MPs, and they are expecting a landslide defeat’
Two ministers under investigation and seven days of unremitting bad press that involved everything from being fined for not wearing a seatbelt to travelling from London to Lancashire on a 14-seater RAF jet – Sunak needs all the help he can get right now. The meeting at Chequers (above) was the latest attempt to come up with a plan to win back the country.
But while Sunak told his ministers that they must “relentlessly focus” on inflation and the NHS to have a chance at the next election, the difficulty of that approach was made abundantly clear in an interview he gave soon afterwards: inevitably, the focus was on Nadhim Zahawi. So how can Sunak go about turning the tide?
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The predicament
Local elections. With the first big electoral test for the government fast approaching in May, high on the agenda will be how to secure the so-called “blue wall” seats that are up for grabs. Unfortunately for Sunak, the polling still stinks. The Conservatives remain stuck at a stubborn 20-point deficit to Labour across multiple pollsters. An Ipsos poll for the Economist last week found that 61% of the public think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, a poll by Redfield and Wilton Strategies of 40 crucial “red wall” seats finds Labour hanging on to 90% of its 2019 voters, against just 55% for the Conservatives.
The Conservative party is disunited. It was presumably pretty awkward at Chequers when the person who was supposed to be heading up the meeting no longer had a formal role – but was nonetheless there. The row surrounding the party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, and his tax affairs has overshadowed pretty much everything, with his own constituents in Stratford-upon-Avon calling on him to resign.
And Zahawi isn’t the only senior Tory cabinet minister giving Sunak a headache. The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar reported that the investigation into the deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, is far more broad than was initially known. At least 24 civil servants are involved in complaints against Raab, leaving him fighting for his political life.
All this is happening as backbenchers line up to tell anyone who will listen of their displeasure with the way the party and country are being governed. “His problem is that he only really has a mandate from them – not even from the party members,” Kiran said. “He really needs them to stay on board, and that has led to the perception that it’s easy to push him around.”
The splits in the party are not just coming from one faction either – with Jessica Elgot reporting last week that some senior Tories expect more liberal Conservatives to start making demands after recent concessions to the right over planning, the environment and online safety. “We cannot have a situation where the prime minister is so frightened of his own party that 30 colleagues can get him to change his mind about anything,” one former cabinet minister said. All this would be much easier to manage if it weren’t for the spectre of Boris Johnson in the background, and the continued view among some MPs that he would be a better electoral bet.
The economy isn’t doing too well either. Jeremy Hunt’s spring budget will be his second fiscal statement since setting light to Liz Truss’s plans in the autumn. And even though the UK avoided a technical recession in November and inflation has now fallen for two months in a row, the cost of living crisis continues to bite many households who are contending with the fastest annual rise in food prices since 1977. Real-terms pay is falling, strikes feel near-constant, and even the Brexit-backing billionaire James Dyson thinks that any growth that can be found is “despite government, rather than because of it”.
With myriad problems on his plate, it seems that Hunt remains single-mindedly focused on inflation, and sees bringing it down as the key to everything. And, to the dismay of his colleagues, tax cuts are still off the table. Instead, Hunt will focus on tackling British “declinism” by pushing policies that allow the private sector to “re-tool” the UK’s industrial base.
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The prescription
Capitalise on Sunak’s relative popularity. OK, the public doesn’t actually like him – that Ipsos poll finds a -9% net favourability rating and Omnisis has him 13 points behind Keir Starmer – but he’s closer to the Labour leader on an individual basis than his party. Part of the Conservative plan visible in last week’s trip to the north of England is to “sell him across the country”, Kiran said. “They think he’s good off-the-cuff and they want to show people that. Obviously that’s no good if you can’t also translate it to a big speech or a TV hit, but he is very good on detail.”
For that to work, Sunak appears to recognise that he has to take public anger with the government on the chin. “He was almost trying to get people to be more combative in their questioning – he said, you don’t have to just ask me about levelling up. People need to see that he understands that the government bears some of the blame for where the country is.”
The Daily Mail reported some optimism ahead of the awayday that it can be done: Isaac Levido, the election strategist, was expected to tell ministers that there was a “narrow” path to election victory because Starmer’s lead is “softer than it looks”.
Get the barnacles off the boat. Cliched though that Lynton Crosbyism is, it remains a succinct summary of familiar advice: focus relentlessly on the issues that matter to voters and abandon everything else. In 2023, that might mean the economy and the NHS, and much less about culture wars: witness the recent decision to abandon Nadine Dorries’ plan to privatise Channel 4.
But that’s much harder because of Sunak’s authority problem in his own party. “If you want the barnacles off the boat, you need to be able to stand up to MPs who want to keep their pet projects in place,” Kiran said. “Some of those barnacles are quite cherished.”
Show some progress. From inflation to the small boats crisis in the Channel, the five pledges were widely noted for how limited they were. Still, they offer the most plausible path to being able to argue that the UK is headed in the right direction. Kiran said: “The campaign they really want to run is a bit like the 2015 one [which saw David Cameron win a Conservative majority after five years of coalition]: ‘difficult decisions have been taken, but there is a better future to come’. Maybe some tax cuts and spending increases after doing the hard bit. But that is a tougher sell when you’ve been in government for 13 years.”
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How likely is all this to work?
Not very. “Sunak is in the worst possible situation,” Kiran said. “He hasn’t got enough time to make a massive difference in policy terms, but there is long enough for the sheen of new leadership to have faded. That’s very awkward.”
It’s perhaps a marker of the two largest parties’ internal psychodramas that both are pessimistic. “Talk to the Tories, especially MPs from the ‘red wall’, and they are expecting a landslide defeat,” Kiran said. “Labour people are very cautiously optimistic that they might get a hung parliament. A lot can change before an election – but the fundamentals for Sunak are so bad that it’s very hard to see how he gets back.”
What else we’ve been reading
Sport
Football | Newcastle midfielder Joelinton pleaded guilty to drink-driving and has been banned from the road for 12 months and fined £31,085 – less than one week’s ages. The 26-year-old will have his driving licence returned after nine months if he completes a drink-driving rehabilitation course.
Tennis | Aryna Sabalenka beat Poland’s Magda Linette, 7-6 (7-1) 6-2 in the Australian Open semi-finals. The victory has ensured that she will play in her first major final.
Football | After the dismissal of Ian Burchnall, former Everton striker Duncan Ferguson has been appointed head coach of Forest Green Rovers, his first managerial role. Ferguson has said that he is “ready for the challenge” to bring up the team which currently sits at the bottom of League One.
The front pages
The Guardian leads this morning with “‘A slap in the face:’ anger at U-turn over Windrush”. Metro has “Under-10s lured into web of evil”, reporting on a “1,000% surge in kids tricked by abusers” online. The Telegraph says “Sturgeon trans law in disarray after rapist climbdown”. The Times has “PM’s foreign student plan to shore up economy” – they’ll be allowed to work longer hours to plug job vacancies. “Rod: we are failing” – that’s the Daily Mirror as Rod Stewart “savages Tories” for whom he no longer votes. The i’s splash is “Zahawi hands over tax returns – as Tories urge him to go now”. “Hunt: time to stop talking Britain down” – that’s the Daily Mail on the chancellor’s speech due to be given today. The Daily Express has a different slant: “Mr Hunt, can we please start talking Britain up?” – it says Tory MPs are the ones telling him to “ditch his gloomy forecasts”. “Freddie slams brakes on telly career” – that’s the Sun after the Top Gear presenter had a crash. The top story in today’s Financial Times is “Rolls-Royce’s new chief sees group as ‘burning platform’ that depletes value”.
Something for the weekend
Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read and listen to right now
TV
Three Minutes: A Lengthening (BBC iPlayer)
This combination of historical investigation, documentary and art piece is astonishing. It takes as its starting point a short home movie shot in Nasielsk, Poland, in 1938. There were 7,000 inhabitants. Of those, 3,000 were Jewish – and only 100 survived the Holocaust. Director Bianca Stigter “lengthens” this clip in many unexpected ways, with poetic narration from Helena Bonham Carter. Rebecca Nicholson
Music
Sam Smith – Gloria
Unholy, a chart-topping collaboration with Kim Petras, represented a departure for Smith, featuring a dramatic choral hook and a stark electronic sound. Things have changed, at least a little, but there’s still something underwhelming about this new album. Its best song might be the disco-fied I’m Not Here to Make Friends, about finding a one-night stand on the dancefloor. Alexis Petridis
Film
The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg’s utterly beguiling fictionalised movie-memoir offers us a stunning critical insight into his own work and how and why artists cauterise childhood pain and rewrite their youth. Young Spielberg is reborn as Sammy Fabelman (above, left) in 1950s New Jersey, and – as with so many autobiographical movies – so much pleasure lies in wondering what is real, and what has been changed. Peter Bradshaw
Podcast
Love, Janessa
BBC Sounds, episodes weekly
Janessa Brazil is a successful adult entertainment star, but her stolen photos also make her the face and body of many global catfishing schemes. Hannah Ajala investigates how it happened, speaking to scammers and their victims who have heartbreaking stories of lost millions and shattered marriages as hope of a new romance turned to despair. Hannah Verdier
Today in Focus
What is the teachers strike really about?
Over the next couple of months, thousands of teachers are due to strike across the UK. What is the government doing in response to their demand for an above-inflation pay increase? Jessica Elgot reports
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
A decade-long study has identified six factors which may help individuals to slow cognitive decline and reduce their risk of developing dementia. A healthy diet, regular exercise, active social contact, cognitive activity, and abstaining from smoking and alcohol were identified as crucial to slowing down memory loss, according to researchers from Beijing’s National Center for Neurological Disorders.
Their research, published in the British Medical Journal, found that people with four to six healthy behaviours were almost 90% less likely to develop dementia compared to those who were the least healthy. Dr Susan Mitchell, head of policy at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said that the study “adds to the substantial evidence that a healthy lifestyle can help to support memory and thinking skills as we age”.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until Monday.
