His first week has not gone well. It’s felt long and eventful with a pile-up of errors that augur trouble ahead: politics is not a grasp of flow charts, but a subtle art. Rishi Sunak is a relative beginner and not, it seems, a quick learner.
His first great blunder, knowingly done, was appointing Suella Braverman home secretary. What can he have been thinking? What Keir Starmer called a “grubby deal” boomeranged back within days. She will be nothing but trouble, with her unravelling account of her leak to rightwing allies. Her adamant pledge to cut net immigration to an impossible “tens of thousands” shuns facts: over 270,000 people arrived in the year to March 2022, mainly with visas, while people arriving in small boats are a small but – thanks to the media – disproportionately visible minority. Her “dreams” of Rwanda and cruelty in cramming arrivals into squalid detention at the Manston processing centre has caused policy mayhem. But she relishes a firefight with ministers who want to both fill vacancies for scientists and IT specialists, and offer visas for Indians as part of a trade deal. Sunak left Michael Gove to pretend on TV that Braverman is “a first-rate front rank politician”. So much for the new honesty.
