It should be a happy year end for the suave “accidental” Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. When he was chancellor from 2020-22 and living in the No 10 flat while Boris and Carrie Johnson held court in the upstairs apartment next door, Sunak and his wife, Akshata Murty, settled in quickly. After Liz Truss won the summer leadership race and made no offer to Sunak to serve in her Cabinet it looked like he and his family might not be visiting again anytime soon. But when Truss crashed and burned along with her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, Sunak was the default candidate to stop markets mayhem and a slide towards Labour. There was, says one of those restored to Cabinet, “a huge sense of relief that we were no longer banging our collective head on a brick wall and making it bleed support”.
The honeymoon has been brief. This week, a flagship policy on house-building targets to address a severe shortage of homes had to be withdrawn after a backbench rebellion by more than 100 MPs. Ministers also face a row over whether the Government wants tougher caps on asylum numbers — with rival Cabinet factions claiming different outcomes are on the table.
The political message is clear — just a couple of months into his tenure, Sunak cannot rely on his MPs to back him on decisive legislation. Another split is between Tories (such as David Davis) who believe the “online harms” Bill to protect the young and vulnerable from harmful social media is unworkable and those who believe the party’s faith in “big tech” has led to a free-for-all.
The U-turn on wind farms comes amid pressure from another faction of Tory MPs keen to boost the UK’s domestic energy security. Simon Clarke — who served in Truss’s Cabinet — has been leading the charge for Sunak to reverse his opposition to new onshore wind turbines. This has been a blustery issue for successive Conservative leaders and Clarke is particularly dangerous as he is a formidable rebel who knows how to attack.
As winter bites and unions threaten disruption, Sunak can also expect more agitation in his ranks. “Something has to change if Rishi is not on a one-way ticket to a big defeat,” admits one of his aides. “He has plans for 2023. But getting through the winter is going to be a trial.”
By his side in the storm, Sunak has a team gathered as he rose fast after entering Parliament in 2015, via chief secretary to the Treasury and a role in the Brexit debates, opting (pragmatically) for the Brexit case. Friends say he is “genuinely Brexit-y — in reckoning Britain has great potential globally outside the EU”. At the same time, Sunak is comfortable on the international stage. He has a solid, if not close, working relationship with Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, dating back to their time as finance ministers, and much in common with France’s Emmanuel Macron from their respective days in banking. His key ally in Cabinet is Jeremy Hunt — Sunak offered him the better Number 11 flat and made clear that the two are “in lockstep” over major policy decisions to stabilise the economy.
That is the crux of Sunak’s power. “He has no electoral or member mandate,” observes one backbencher who backed him reluctantly to stabilise the party in October. “So he had to succeed on competence and the jury is still out on that.” Sunak’s first speech as PM, to the CBI last month, was deemed unspectacular by many in the City, smarting from corporation tax being put back up to 25 per cent from the Truss-Kwarteng-backed 19 per cent. Conservative Home founder Tim Montgomerie, with strong connections across the Right of the party, summarised a raft of discontents in a tweet yesterday which (condensed) ran: “We aren’t controlling immigration. We aren’t extending home ownership. We aren’t reforming public services. We aren’t curtailing the Left’s powerbase in universities, Whitehall or the arts. We aren’t conservative.”
Sunak’s problem is redefining — post- Brexit, Johnson and Truss — what being Conservative will mean to voters at the next election. When I debated this with former Cabinet minister Theresa Villiers on the BBC’s Politics Live, she made a firm case against the imposition of housing targets on constituencies like her own in Chipping Barnet. Jacob Rees-Mogg (himself a former serial rebel over Brexit implementation after 2016, fixed-term parliaments and more) chimes in that we are living in an “era of rebellion” and scolding the insurgents: “These rebellions are ill-advised … you don’t help your own seat by making life difficult for the Government”.
However paradoxical, the support will be gratefully received in Downing Street. Day to day, Sunak relies on his tactical approach of trying to balance out squabbling tendencies by giving the differing wings of the party airtime in Cabinet — and paying fealty to the legacy of Boris Johnson. James Cleverly, seen as a symbolic senior Brexiteer presence, survives as Foreign Secretary and Sunak is careful to consult a rising generation of those on the Right of many arguments, like Michelle Donelan at DCMS and Kemi Badenoch.
Sunak, as an Oxford-educated banker, is at pains to have a range of experience around the table. Cleverly, for example, is the first Foreign Secretary in living memory to have a degree from outside the top universities, having attended Ealing College of Higher Education (now the University of West London).
There is, however, still ample space for former Oxford Union champion debaters, including Michael Gove and work and pensions secretary Mel Stride. Sunak, says one friend, “is comfortable giving speeches, but he knows he needs reinforcement in the knockabout of the Commons, where the combat can be brutal when you are on the back foot.”
This focus has, however, led to a dearth of women in the upper roles of Cabinet. Sunak has sought to balance this out with a heavily female advisory team, hiring TV executive Amber de Botton as head of communications. De Botton’s deputy is Nissy Chesterfield, who worked as a special adviser for Truss at the Department of International Trade.
Retaining Suella Braverman as Home Secretary has already led to tensions. There are questions over whether Braverman was signalling a new policy direction when she wrote the foreword to a CPS think-tank pamphlet by Theresa May’s former strategy adviser Nick Timothy, published this week, which called for a tough “ceiling’ on asylum applications. This would mean limiting asylum places outside an approved list of (mainly) Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria to a mere 20,000. Formally, the Home Office and Braverman’s team insist that no such decision has been made, which is code for a tussle in Cabinet. Internal critics argue it would be a return to what May termed the “nasty party” reputation of the Conservatives.
Supporters close to Braverman say the UK is being targeted by borderline cases from Albania and that failure to tackle this will lead to disillusionment, especially among Brexit voters.
No 10 yesterday took the unusual step of intervening in the row, saying: “The Home Secretary herself made clear she didn’t agree with all the proposals in the report. We recognise the need to go further on this important issue. It’s an issue at the forefront of the public’s mind… [but] there is no single overnight solution to what is a global problem.”
How to put pressure on Keir Starmer’s advance is another pressure point. Toughening immigration policy discomfits the Opposition, and Tories also hope that union militancy over pay deals will remind voters of Labour’s ties to the union movement. It might just as well show a government under pressure from multiple directions — and blaming everyone but itself for the failure to get a grip on the situation, or choose the issues on which it can cohere and fight. As Sunak prepares for those inevitable pictures alongside the Downing Street Christmas tree, the prize he needs to hang onto is power over his own disputatious ranks. That is the hardest crowd of all.
