Rishi Sunak trying to win back public support reminds me of the economist stranded on a desert island with a chemist and physicist. A tin of beans washes ashore and an argument breaks out over how to access the contents. The physicist suggests using spectacles to focus the sun’s rays into a penetrating beam. The chemist suggests using sea salt to corrode the seal. “It’s OK, I’ve got this,” says the economist. “First, we assume a tin opener …”
It’s a joke with many variations but always about the kind of person who has a clever theoretical model to explain how the world would work if only everyone behaved according to the model, which they don’t.
A standard model of elections posits that good economic news in the period preceding polling day benefits the government. Inflation is falling. Britain is no longer in recession. Wages are creeping up. There is polling evidence that people are feeling more optimistic about the future.
This trickle of data irrigates hope in Downing Street that parched electoral terrain might yet be reclaimed for the Tories. No one is predicting a bounteous harvest of pro-Sunak sentiment. But a stable, growing economy does provide the Tory leader with a viable campaign strategy: assert that “the plan is working”; warn that Labour would blow it.
That this is the Tories’ best bet doesn’t make it a good one. Voters haven’t forgotten which party caused the mess that Sunak claims credit for fixing. Also, economic optimism doesn’t always favour incumbents. It can stimulate the appetite for a fresh start, under new leaders.
But the main reason I doubt the economy will come to Sunak’s rescue is that he is looking at public opinion the way the marooned economist looks at the tin of beans. The problem is getting through at all. The solution does not begin by assuming people are listening, or that they want to be persuaded.
Sunak will struggle to engineer a feelgood factor when he doesn’t understand why voters feel bad. That isn’t a matter of wealth, or not exclusively. The prime minister’s vast personal riches (surpassing King Charles III’s comparatively modest fortune) don’t have to be a barrier to popularity. Britain has voted for millionaires before. The main missing component in the model, the absent tin opener, is an intuitive grasp of the way public services nurture or deplete national wellbeing.
This is, above all, a failure of imagination. Sunak’s dwindling band of supporters are fond of lauding his brain power. There is no reason to think they are fabricating that quality, but it comes in many forms. Computational speed and a capacious memory for detail can’t compensate for a deficit of creativity, or empathy. When a leader is said to always be the smartest guy in the room, it’s usually a sign they need a smarter room.
There is a big difference between publishing a graph showing NHS waiting lists going down and understanding – or being able to communicate – what it means to have an operation cancelled for the third time. A party that pledges to recruit more police officers will not be trusted by someone who waited in vain for the police to turn up when their home was burgled.
Sunak’s credibility has been incinerated by the slow burn of chronic underinvestment. He wasn’t even an MP in the period of George Osborne’s austerity budgets, but he lacks the ideological flexibility and the candour to level with the public about the causes of their pain. Still less admit the pain yet to come.
And there is plenty. Take prisons, for example. From Thursday, criminals serving short sentences will be eligible for release up to 70 days early because there aren’t enough cells to hold them. The discount has crept up from 18 days over the course of this year as the shortage of capacity has become more urgent. The government would like to fight an election pledging toughness on crime, which usually translates as harsher tariffs. But even if the police catch all the villains, there is nowhere to put them and not enough court capacity to convict them.
Prison policy isn’t usually an election issue, but the criminal justice system nearing collapse is getting hard to ignore. The government’s remedy is to squeeze budgets tighter. In order to generate fiscal “headroom” for national insurance cuts this side of an election, the chancellor has booked eye-watering budget restraint across Whitehall starting in 2025. Once funding pledges for the NHS, schools and defence are factored in, the cost to unprotected departments is about 13%, or £19bn across four years – the sequel to Osborne-era austerity, but inflicted on less resilient services that are experiencing higher public demand.
When Conservative strategists lament the absence of any polling dividend from those national insurance cuts, they might want to consider the possibility that voters can see what is going on. They know they are being bribed with money cynically plundered from their own future.
That isn’t to say people like taxes or trust the public sector to always make the best use of its resources. Often they don’t. But that is a secular scepticism, not a theological hostility to government intervention. It doesn’t stop voters including the health of the public realm in the broad evaluation of how well-off they feel.
Lower inflation (when everything still feels expensive) won’t shift that dial. More tax cuts (when the overall tax burden is still high) won’t shift it. Growth in GDP won’t shift it, nor will any trend on a graph that the prime minister offers as proof that his plan is working.
I could be wrong about this. There might be a reservoir of wavering Tory voters who can be mobilised into a Sunak surge by a parade of promising macroeconomic data. But there is, I suspect, a larger group that has decided the country needs change. For them, the time between now and polling day is just a drag, an opportunity cost imposed by a squatter prime minister; a waiting charge, a nuisance.
Postponing an election in the hope of an economic upturn could easily make the Tory predicament worse. The longer people feel trapped in a cell on Sunak’s spreadsheet, the more they will hanker for release. This is the fatal flaw in the model. A prime minister can’t be saved by a feelgood factor when regime change is a precondition for voters feeling better.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
