Rishi Sunak sat down to dinner last night in the clubbable company of a hundred or so Tory peers — one of the set-piece events at which a prime minister gets to bask in the warm glow of approval from his own side. Tory peers, however, can be a disputatious bunch, because so many were appointed by departing premiers of differing ideological stripes. This time, however, Sunak was assured of a warm welcome and decent wine, which he does not touch as a teetotaller.
For the close-knit team Sunak assembled in haste on becoming Prime Minister in the chaos of last autumn’s “Truss-ageddon,” it feels like the “Rishi recipe” is starting to work — at least in establishing their man as the person with the “residency rights” at No10 until the next election (by the end of 2024), and setting a clearer tone in the direction of government. Noisy talk of challenges have faded to whimpers and even beneficiaries of the Boris era of domination see last week’s Partygate hearings as a moment their tousled hero started to feel like yesterday’s man.
Isaac Levido, the laconic Australian-born campaign strategist now regularly advising Sunak (as he did Johnson in 2019), briefed the Cabinet recently on the “narrow path to victory” the Tories can take — but only if they accept the brutal discipline of staying on message on agreed topics, and leave the in-fighting behind. Levido has a laid-back delivery and with his neat beard and hoodie looks like a genteel hipster. He has a way, as one Cabinet member puts it, “of sounding deceptively mild until you realise he is actually saying something devastating”.
One point Levido has made is that any occasion when Johnson is in the national conversation makes things worse for the Government. It is one reason why Sunak warned that comments on the rights and wrongs of the privileges committee, and Johnson’s appearance, were unwelcome. “Rishi hardly ever swears,” says one backbench loyalist “but the instruction was clear — shut the f*** up and get on with the day jobs”.
A number of factors explain the spring in Sunak’s well-shod step. The first is that his broad strategy of focusing on slashing inflation in half from the peak of more than 10 per cent at the start of the year gives him a clear road of progress to follow, with the likelihood of it succeeding. Sunak has long argued that the Tories could not get back into the argument about how to address the real-terms fall in household wages and prosperity unless they first deal with the impact of rising prices.
That does not resolve the matter of how to restore better growth and ease household burdens, but it does define Sunak as a leader with the beginning of an economic plan. Levido’s strategic nous is balanced by the more fine-grained Westminster touch of journalist-turned-political adviser James Forsyth, a school friend of Sunak, and lively communications guru Amber de Botton, from ITV (she helped oversee an award-winning series on the Partygate scandal).
Strikes, another horseman of the political apocalypse, are abating with an NHS settlement under way and junior doctors in talks. Even the RMT, the toughest of the transport unions, has called off rail stoppages until the end of April. Money to cushion settlements may well have been found down the back of the Exchequer sofa by Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor. That means the talk of a “winter of discontent”, with chaos engulfing Sunak’s leadership, has segued into a watery spring with rays of hope. At the same time, Sunak’s determination to reconnect the UK to mainland Europe, including that invitation for the EU Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen to team with the King at Windsor to mark the draft agreement on Northern Ireland — and his desire to avoid a full confrontation with the European courts over the Rwanda asylum policy — mean the UK is back “on the reservation” in having better dealings with European leaders.
The final blessing is that the air is fast rushing out of the Boris balloon. The previous leader’s decision to oppose the Windsor Framework — the Sunak-led fix for the messy stand-off over trade and transport arrangements with Northern Ireland after Brexit — was widely seen as a rallying call to the European Reform Group and Tory Right to oppose the solution.
But when Johnson left the committee hearing to vote against the “Stormont brake” (a fudge to allow the supremacy of European law in trade disputes regarding the province, while giving some (skimpy) control mechanisms to the Northern Ireland assembly), less than two dozen MPs voted with him — including Truss and Priti Patel, the former home secretary. The Boris bandwagon failed to roll. This week, as the Asylum and Immigration bill wends its way awkwardly through Parliament, Sunak faces a different source of tension. A movement on the Right of the party, allegedly supported by his own Home Secretary Suella Braverman, wants to harden up the bill to remove legal protections for those arriving illegally and who go on to claim asylum.
The Gary Lineker intervention, which rocked the BBC and led to a split in public opinion over whether the present asylum system is too harsh or being routinely dodged by the boats arriving on the south coast, was also a moment where spin doctors held their breath for a blow-up. Sunak, to the relief of many MPs, handled it adroitly by leaving it to the BBC to decide the way out of the mess. Sunak’s personal views about immigration and asylum are also, as a fellow Tory from a British-Asian background puts it, “pretty robust” for which reason he has, to the disappointment of liberal admirers, backed the Rwanda plan. Electorally, Tory strategists see toughness on this as a vital “authority issue” for the Government. But unlike his Home Secretary, Sunak is wary of an all-out confrontation with the European Court of Human Rights.
One other revelation timed, perhaps not coincidentally by “Rich Rishi”, was the release last week of his tax return, a decision to show the warts-and-all of his personal wealth (independent from his wife’s income from her own investments and family stake in the vast Infosys business). His tax returns allow a peak into the PM’s personal pension pot — with income of £4.7 million over three years from investments (now held in blind trusts on his behalf) — and capital gains far outstripping his MP and ministerial salary. “Out of touch” is an accusation frequently hurled at a leader who clearly still relished the trappings of luxury — a large house in his constituency, as I discovered profiling his wife, the astute Akshata Murthy, spared little expense on beautiful textiles and acreages of pricey curtains. These days, the Sunaks keep the glitzier side of life quieter.
The spin Tory tacticians prefer is that Sunak’s expertise in finance should be presented as a calling card, of the kind which made him comfortable dealing with the recent rescue package for the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank. The rebranding of Sunak from ingenue to technocrat who can see a bruised country through confusing times depends of course on finding an answer to voters’ concerns on the decline in living standards and low growth to offset the widespread perception that their prosperity has dwindled under Tory rule — a key attack line for Labour.
The elections academic Rob Ford notes one point of relative optimism: “Tory incumbents since 1945 have regained an average of 10 points on election day — and three Conservative governments since 1945 have faced doldrums comparable to Sunak and yet gone on to win.” He can boast a distinct improvement in confidence in his leadership among Tory voters, according to polls since the Northern Ireland agreement was forged and a more modest one among voters across the spectrum.
The challenge is that “narrow path to victory, the party needs to chart is not just in the hands of Sunak, but a party which has lost the sense of leading the argument on the economy, public services, and which has fallen into tribal internal enmities. Sunak has improved that in a steady half year in charge. It’s unlikely that he sees the next election as a probable outright win with Labour holding a 20 point lead. But he took the job to get his party — and the country — out of a rut and back into contention next year. He might even be getting somewhere, as the post-Boris era dawns and the Rishi recipe starts cooking.
