This week, Rishi Sunak will clock up – celebrate wouldn’t be the mot juste – his 100th day at Number 10. It is an important milestone for a leader when judgments about his performance start to crystallise. Tory MPs gave him the top job in reaction to the manic chaos generated by his predecessors and he sold himself as the doctor who would cure the maladies that Liz Truss and Boris Johnson had inflicted on the country. He would restore confidence in the government’s fiscal competence after the lunacies of the brief reign of Mad Queen Liz and rebuild trust in the government’s ethical integrity after the moral squalor presided over by Bad King Boris.
On the first mission, Mr Sunak has succeeded to the limited extent that financial markets think Britain is now under more reliable management, but at the price of jacking up taxes to an even higher level and while presiding over waves of industrial unrest the like of which we’ve not seen in this country for decades.
