As the legendary political thinker Zsa Zsa Gabor once put it: “Macho does not prove mucho.” Faced with the most disruptive combination of industrial action in essential services in decades, the first instinct of Rishi Sunak and his cabinet was to put on muscle suits, beat their silicone chests and declare that they would tough it out. Ministers refused to come to the negotiating table with the unions while dismissing every pay claim as unaffordable. They adopted this uncompromising posture in the belief that time would be their ally and the enemy of those withdrawing their labour in protest at the squeeze on the real value of their incomes.
One of the cabinet’s key assumptions was that public sympathy for strikers would ebb as people began to suffer the consequences. The other calculation among ministers was that the resolve of strikers would fray. Infused with an archaic nostalgia for the epic battles waged between the Thatcher government and trade unions in the 1980s, a lot of Tories even thought that widespread industrial unrest would rebound to their party’s advantage.
