Rishi Sunak’s biggest successes are still being overlooked

The Prime Minister's burden is that his remedies rely on time to bed in - but the election clock is counting down

The Prime Minister marked his one-year Rishi-versary with a cake as a rare concession to breaking his ultra-healthy diet, with no champagne (he is teetotal) and a homely Labrador mug on the desk to show a sliver of playfulness. To give a leader who inherited the chaos of the Liz Truss intermezzo due credit, the achievement of Rishi Sunak’s year is that he is there at all.

The adrenalin hit of the Boris Johnson and Truss years left the Government with the shakes, and the Sunak treatment was a steady correction to ensure that money markets and mortgage holders knew that a period of overzealous ideology has been replaced by a steady hand at the tiller. Largely, Sunak has stayed true to that aim.

He is a believer in lower taxation and the kind of “supply side” reforms that he thinks many economists discount too readily as levers for pulling a sluggish UK economy out of the doldrums. His burden – and the cause of many of the party management problems he continues to face – is that his remedies tend to be carefully phased and rely on time to bed in.

If Truss headed off at a wild pace on a tax-slashing, stimulus-raising agenda that crashed and burned, Sunak is staying true to his pastime of long-distance running. A £55bn package of tax rises and some spending cuts helps his reputation as a sound bookkeeper to UK plc.

What it does not do is make clear why people who are fed up with the Tory record and a wave of national headaches, from strikes to the cost of living drag, should feel attached to his solutions, as opposed to being ready to try a different dish.

This combination of factors irks Conservative MPs, who make half-hearted attempts to unseat him, a foolish undertaking that would only bring on a new election (there is a limit to how many times a government can change its leader without a mandate) and Sunak has understood that this constrains his ability to take more risky paths.

But that is changing: Sunak’s recent Tory conference speech exhibited a desire for radical change from a character whose stock-in-trade has been a kind of polished gradualism.

Sunak, contrary to common wisdom, does not believe that the next election is hopeless. That is not to say he thinks it is a likely Tory win, but that he believes the present 18-point gap with Labour will come under more strain, and that given the mountain of votes needed to shift for a Starmer majority, that boxing clever – even cynically so – on some cultural “wedge” issues, bringing forward targeted tax cuts (starting as soon as the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement), and underlining the importance of an experienced hand given the crisis in the Middle East, will make his poor record look better.

There is credit to give to Sunak on a personal level – he has been a largely benign and stable personality at the helm of a fractious party. And while some of his Cabinet choices, such as Suella Braverman as a fiery Home Secretary, have been divisive, he has begun to tackle the small boats issue, which, whether liberal voters like it or not, jars with many people who felt that it showcased a lack of control of the country’s borders and was symptomatic of a failure to grip a longstanding problem.

His difficulties have been calibrating political messages to match his beliefs, which include an outward looking “global Britain” that needs to shine as a magnet for investment in new industries like AI and technology.

Sunak on Thursday delivered a major speech pledging to address the dangers of artificial intelligence – but also to exploit the opportunities it offers. He will host a major AI summit next week, in the hope of boosting the UK’s chances of establishing itself as a regulatory broker between the US and Europe.

As an unrepentant Brexiteer, he has also been able to prove that removing the UK from more onerous EU regulation has had some advantages: inward investment has not dried up.

A lot of his bandwidth goes, less visibly to the public or MPs, on acting as a personal ambassador for UK business, particularly in areas he hopes will send a message that the country can become more productive and create durable new jobs as companies look for democratic “safe havens”.

The less gripping side of this, in terms of his campaigning appeal, is that it leaves the Prime Minister talking about topics like maths education and tech summits when the gains of the decisions lie further down the line.

Ditto the ban on young people taking up smoking, a good example of a Sunak personal passion to decrease avoidable deaths – one of his “personal” policies that has tested best with voters.

The problem with Sunak, as one of his strongest party allies puts it, is that he is developing as a politician – with a serious desire to sort our economic issues and a raft of ideas which he hopes will convince grumpy MPs, many of whom did not vote for him – but there is a hard electoral deadline approaching and a fresh Labour challenger who will take agility and even aggression to beat.

“Rishi is not as nice as he looks – or at least he’d better not be,” observes an old university friend in the party. But polite is not the same as nice.

One year in and with the clock now on countdown, Sunak believes he can mitigate a Tory disaster. It’s not the same as winning – but it’s the best a realist can hope for when it comes to losing.

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