There is something accidental about Rishi Sunak. Partly it is the route he took to Downing Street, taking over from someone who had recently beaten him in a race to the top. It was unceremonious, like an athlete collecting the gold medal after the winner fails a drugs test.
But the malaise goes deeper – to the absence of a purpose beyond clearing up the mess made by previous Tory governments. If Sunak has a vision of what to achieve as prime minister, its fulfilment lies across a slurry pit filled with his predecessor’s mistakes. Even if he crosses with rare panache he will stink before reaching the other side.
The state of public finances, made precarious by Liz Truss’s harebrained experiments in fiscal alchemy, is only the first problem.
All of the proposed remedies, any configuration of spending cuts and tax rises, come with nasty side-effects. Austerity threatens to further depress demand in a shrinking economy. There will be discontent this winter.
When inflicting pain on the public, prime ministers excuse themselves in three ways: they blame the state of things as they found them on taking office; they blame the global economic climate; they describe a pleasing destination that will make the arduous journey worthwhile.
None of those is straightforward for Sunak. The legacy argument rebounds on his own party. On the international front, Russian aggression is a cause of high energy prices and Britain is not alone in suffering inflation, but voters expect their own government to have solutions, not point at problems overseas. As for joy on the horizon, that is the rhetorical repertoire of new regimes. It takes a fresh mandate to appeal for patience.
Boris Johnson could get away with it in 2019, after nearly a decade of Conservative rule, because Brexit was a departure from everything that came before. The journey was beginning. But now we are there. This is Tory utopia and Sunak can’t explain why it is so crap.
Worse than an absence of direction is the loss of any sense of direction. It is a crisis told in the parable of Gavin Williamson, sacked twice for failure in senior government roles, now stepping down from his cabinet role as minister without portfolio after allegations of bullying and intimidation of colleagues and officials.
There must have been a question that Sunak asked himself to which Williamson was an answer. It can’t have been anything to do with effective administration or restoring integrity to government. That leaves the trade in favours, paying back allies and keeping a ruthless operator inside the tent, instead of letting him loose to cause trouble on the backbenches.
The reason for having Williamson back in government is also the reason many Tories wanted him out. Someone whose value to a leader is brutal, amoral effectiveness at power games will collect enemies. His attachment to Sunak, having served others with mercenary promiscuity, has stirred old resentments. It also exposes a lack of broader deference to the current leader. If more MPs feared Sunak or wanted him to succeed they wouldn’t have been gunning for his lieutenant.
Williamson doesn’t represent any ideological strain of Toryism. His exclusion from cabinet won’t alter the balance of left and right, moderate or radical. He is a sower of poison, now reaping a vengeful harvest.
The party has reached that dirty stage of ungovernability, symptomatic of long incumbency, when ideas are stale, ambitions have been thwarted and MPs find personal vendetta more compelling than policy.
That dismal state coincides with a more profound crisis in Conservatism. The core of the problem is that winning the key electoral battles over Brexit – the referendum and the 2019 general election – required the embrace of a radical nationalism that relishes destruction of established institutions, flirts openly with far-right xenophobia and despises compromise. It isn’t conservative.
That wasn’t an issue when Johnson was in his pomp. He dealt with the contradictions by upstaging them, making himself the story and the object of allegiance. Liz Truss won the Tory leadership as the candidate of continuity in denial, then steered the party into a high-speed collision with reality.
Truss’s short reign was long enough to discredit her creed – a libertarian monomania that would never have won an electoral mandate on its own. It entered Downing Street on the back of a tiger called Brexit, which has now unsaddled four Tory riders.
Sunak’s base is more liberal-minded Tories who think it is high time that beast was tamed, but he is wary of carnivorous MPs of the populist stripe. He doesn’t want to starve them of favours for fear of one day becoming their next meal. That is why he appears stuck, directionless, not a maker of news but the kind of leader to whom news happens.
Maybe he has some bold move planned to seize the initiative. Sunak is more popular than his party. But for that to be a strength he has to look in control, which means having an agenda that others follow; something more than clearing up someone else’s mess. Otherwise he is a caretaker in a careless party and another Tory accident waiting to happen.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
