When Rishi Sunak told his MPs to unite behind him last week, many were left scratching their heads. Both the subject and object of the sentence baffled them. How was it possible for Conservative MPs to wean themselves off their addiction to psychodrama after eight straight years of it? And what, precisely, were they supposed to unite behind?
Sunak told the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers last Wednesday that the majority of MPs in the room “are determined to fight: to stand up for our values, our vision and our record”. But even his allies admit privately to being confused about what they are supposed to say about any of those three things. Which Rishi Sunak are they supposed to be backing? There are almost as many versions of the prime minister as there are Barbie dolls. Initially, he was Not-Truss Rishi: the antidote to the near-fatal poisoning of the party by the Liz Truss premiership. Like a Barbie doll with specific cultural references, like the 1980s Barbie and the Rockers Barbie, who carried a cassette of her own tunes that children today would struggle to play, let alone understand, this version was a very particular solution to a very particular problem and Sunak is now much closer to the election than he is to the madness of September 2022.
Part of the not-Truss pitch was that Sunak is a technocrat, and his pragmatism and rationality are something a good number of Tory MPs continue to value. “What Rishi basically stands for,” says a minister and Sunak ally, “is a return to normal Conservative politics. He’s pragmatic, sensible and moderate. That’s the sort of Tory government voters want, but they don’t appear to be warming to it yet.” The problem is also that those three qualities have been absent from Conservative politics for so long that they now wind up a similarly sizeable number of Tory MPs. One minister says: “Ultimately, it’s about uniting behind a bright, moral leader who works better on spreadsheets and in detail than in slogans … But I do just wonder if politics is broken right now and if you can govern sensibly in insensible times.”
What isn’t helping is a sense that the Downing Street operation is not functioning properly. “There is absolutely no excuse for the way they handled the Frank Hester stuff,” complains one mildly Rishi-sceptic MP. “Or the Lee Anderson stuff.” One minister complains that the No 10 comms operation would have far more time to handle these kinds of crises well, and perhaps even to communicate some of the things the party has achieved, if backbenchers weren’t taking up a disproportionate amount of time and energy with their own damaging behaviour. Given how long the Tory party has been in a self-destructive mood, though, this is rather like building your house below the tide line and complaining daily when it floods.
So, then, what about Rishi the change candidate, who made a brief appearance in the autumn as he pledged to end a 30-year consensus before appointing one of the key figures from those three decades – David Cameron – as his foreign secretary? That version of the prime minister has come back again in the form of an ambition to end what he is now trying to brand as the “double taxation” of national insurance. This pledge is really popular among his backers, with many of them mentioning it as his strongest point and a key example of his vision. What does wind up even quite mellow Tory MPs, though, is Patrician Rishi, the version of the prime minister who bans smoking and relies on Labour votes to do it. This is a very personal mission of Sunak, but it is not really in keeping with the overall Conservative brand, and the sort of Rishi that will have a limited production run.
Then again, there is Democracy Rishi, who comes with his own counter-extremism strategy that turns out to have annoyed half of the cabinet and a good few backbenchers, too. This is a classic example of a product that was brought to market too soon: Sunak saw the opportunity offered by the election of George Galloway in Rochdale and seized on it, without working out what he personally wanted to do.
Perhaps it’s the Isaac Levido creation that wants to use basic Australian-style attack campaigning to reduce the polling deficit. At its most basic, this strategy manifests itself in extremely weird social media graphics that look like they’ve been created by a 22-year-old who describes themselves as a “firebrand libertarian” at parties. There was the recent graphic that said: “Are you a terrorist in need of legal advice? Better call Keir.” It is extraordinary that a party ostensibly committed to preserving institutions should think it is at all acceptable to suggest the justice system would be better served if both parties didn’t have access to the best legal representation possible so that a verdict can be considered safe and trustworthy. Mind you, some of Sunak’s own attempts haven’t gone much better: he also regularly jokes about Keir Starmer invoicing Hizb ut-Tahrir. His recent “joke” about Starmer not being able to define what a woman is when Brianna Ghey’s mother was visiting parliament had all the sensitivity of a rhinoceros. The basic problem with that version of Sunak is that it’s just not him: most Tory MPs describe him as “decent and trustworthy” – even to a fault. One of his backers says: “No one thinks he has a bad bone in his body, but I think prime ministers probably need to have a few bad bones in them.”
Barbies famously struggle with anatomical accuracy, while the lack of bad bones in Rishi dolls means that there is, in the words of one of his colleagues, “a vacuum created by the absence of compelling leadership”. Tory MPs who don’t like the prime minister are perfectly happy to fill that vacuum themselves with their own plots and dramas, and that’s the image projected to the public because journalists find it significantly easier to write about plots than they do about vacuums. MPs who were present at the 1922 Committee meeting last Wednesday were privately impressed with his message to the party that, if they try to hurt him, then they really end up hurting their colleagues, not least because the local elections are just around the corner. There is cabinet frustration with the MPs who seem to have given up and who are trying their best to hurt Sunak. One minister says: “If these colleagues have given up hope, then they should step down and someone else can actually fight their seat for the party. The way they are behaving is like someone who complains they are a bit overweight while eating cream buns and not going to the gym.”
The retort from other ministers and backbench plotters is that Sunak himself is a major reason the party is sliding in the polls because he simply does not offer a coherent vision of himself to Tory MPs, let alone the public. Even MPs who wish him well have complained to his team repeatedly that they do not know what the prime minister stands for, and that when they go out on the doorstep to meet voters, they have no idea which Rishi they are supposed to be selling. Whenever I ask a Tory MP what the prime minister stands for, the response runs thus: “Oh, don’t ask me that. Oh, ah. Um. Well, he’s very pragmatic.”
There won’t be many of Sunak’s colleagues in parliament this week. One of the reasons the government was content to delay the final stages of the safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill until after the Easter recess is that it means the whip can be relaxed for the final few sitting days this week. If MPs are on a one-line whip, then they may not come into Westminster at all and the hope is that, instead of buzzing around like angry bees inside parliament, they’ll go back to their constituencies and meet some normal people who help them to calm down. Tory MPs who were out campaigning last week say that voters aren’t angry with them and are in a reasonably friendly mood, suggesting that the current dire polling figures won’t stay this bad for long. Perhaps after Easter they will return in a better mood and feel ready to unite behind their leader. But that really depends on whether Sunak has united the different versions of himself first.
• Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of the Spectator
