Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)Politics in government, when it is done properly, is meant to be boring. The process of change is glacial and not an especially interesting spectator sport. It is a mark of how badly the Conservative party has recently been conducting its politics that it has not managed to be boring since the distant days of Theresa May. Now Rishi Sunak is pledging that his time in office will be dull. Sadly, he’s likely to be wrong.
Two prime ministers ago, it was Boris Johnson’s regular accusation in Parliament that the Labour leader Keir Starmer was boring. Johnson said it so often, and descended into such chaos himself, that Starmer began to take the description on as a kind of compliment. It wasn’t long, though, before his colleagues tired of Mr Johnson’s brand of charismatic leadership and sought a prime minister who was less of a party animal. They failed, though, to achieve the boring stability they professed to want. Liz Truss, with the inspired help of her then-friend Kwasi Kwarteng, spooked the markets and lasted a mere 44 days during which she kept on being interesting by accident.
Now Rishi Sunak has come into the top job claiming that he, at last, will achieve the status of being boring. It is not likely to be possible, even though Mr Sunak himself is a perfectly boring character. The circumstances he inherits, however, are not conducive to calm and quiet government. With inflation running at more than 10 per cent overall and price rises for food and energy even higher there will be few days in which the headlines are not troublesome for the Government. The public finances are in a dreadful state, wage demands in the public sector are unlikely to be met and there will doubtless be cuts coming to public services. Mr Sunak is reported to have wondered where the £30 million surplus he left behind had disappeared to.
It’s not going to be easy and, as a result, it’s going to be newsworthy all the way through.
Besides, there is a misunderstanding contained in Mr Sunak’s claim that he would like to dial down on the theatre and spectacle. Every few years, after the demise of a charismatic leader, we indulge ourselves in the idea that we want a duller premier instead. This was said when John Major took over from Margaret Thatcher in 1990. It was the principal justification for replacing Tony Blair with Gordon Brown in 2007. “Not Flash, just Gordon,” as the advertising slogan put it. Yet it’s never really true. It’s never long into the tenure of the new, duller, prime minister that we start craving the return of charisma. Political appeal is in part theatrical and it is hard to do the job without it.
Mr Sunak will have to try because he is a stiff communicator. He does employ plenty of skilled people to do the choreographed part of communication. His speeches are well prepared and considered. His production team knock out the slick videos and he has just hired Amber de Botton, a well-regarded journalist from ITV, to be his head of communications. Although he attracted a lot of criticism for how wooden he sounded in his first official outings as Prime Minister, at the podium in Downing Street, Mr Sunak is a serviceable speaker.
There is always, though, the sense of something missing. And that missing ingredient is the virtue to which we usually give the name of charisma. Mr Sunak actually will be a little boring. He has a way of sounding a little embarrassed to be there, especially when trying to simulate the display of passion. In the videos his team releases from behind the scenes with Mr Sunak and his campaign team, the principal himself always comes across as a rather shy English public schoolboy who has learned how to display emotion from a YouTube video. When the bad economic news starts to roll in, Mr Sunak is going to need to draw on some reserves of charisma. The real circumstances of life are, sadly, not going to be boring and it is not going to be any sort of comfort to have a prime minister who is.
Because the formula for the ideal political leader is, in fact, different. What we really crave is a prime minister who can do boring but makes it sound interesting. The Clinton years in America were an almost unrelieved parade of economic growth. The Blair years were similar. Slow politics and a fast leader. The next two years promises the exact opposite.
