Rishi Sunak’s week of howlers has exposed his big weakness

It is quite some achievement to launch an attack on Keir Starmer’s contortions over trans rights versus women’s rights and come off worse. Yet that is what has happened to Rishi Sunak this week thanks to an increasingly visible flaw in his make-up: Sunak simply lacks political nous. While he may have been a fluent public performer when serving as chancellor during the covid pandemic, it has become obvious that this was because he was in his comfort zone as a financial geek.

But exposed to the much wider demands that the post of Prime Minister entails, Sunak is all at sea. He cannot spot an ambush to save his life and is also too inexperienced to understand historical context. These limitations are leading more and more to him doing painfully gauche things that cause more seasoned Conservative performers to stare at political events through gaps in their fingers while contemplating a looming general election campaign.

There were indicators of this during the first Tory leadership contest of 2022 – the one in which he was soundly beaten by Liz Truss. Most notably, he told a gathering of prosperous southern Tories about his work to divert public funds away from ‘deprived urban areas’. A more experienced operator would have contented themselves in making the uncontroversial positive case that non-urban areas merited investment too.

The one thing that can be said for the plethora of mis-steps Sunak has made this week is that each one has at least crowded out focus on its predecessor. Who now cares about Sunak accepting a £1,000 on-air bet with Piers Morgan about his chances of sending some migrants on a one-way flight to deepest Africa before the election? His lurch into prep school humour at Prime Minister’s Questions, after he had been told that the mother of murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey was on the parliamentary estate, swiftly shunted that one down the pecking order.

The irritation he caused among older voters when photographs emerged of him body-hugging Sinn Fein’s Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill, rather than just shaking her hand, was also displaced as a cause of ire.

For my money, his biggest blunder this week was actually his almost flippant reaction to news that King Charles was suffering from cancer. Sunak blithely declared: ‘I have no doubt he’ll be back to full strength in no time.’ Yet anyone who knows anyone who has faced cancer, which is almost all of us, will understand that doubt is a consistent part of the equation, as is a protracted recovery period even if things go well.

When Sunak attacked Starmer over his stance on the trans issue, he made a simple mistake: the PM failed to appreciate that doing so immediately after the trial of Brianna Ghey’s killers amounted to a radically different context compared to talking about trans during, for instance, the Isla Bryson controversy.

As a result, Sunak’s PMQs comments have already had a damaging first order political effect for the Tories. It has largely overshadowed a key and long-awaited strategic tussle over Labour’s ditching of its £28 billion green investment plan. As such, it constitutes the first recorded example of a dead cat strategy in which the distraction of a feline corpse has been engineered by the opponent of the beneficiary.

Had money man Sunak properly engaged with the serious consequences of the trans phenomenon on women’s protected spaces then perhaps he would not have thought it a suitable subject for humour at all. But in fact he, like Starmer, has proved a weathervane on the issue. Those of us who have followed the issue closely over the years well remember his fence-sitting when asked by the redoubtable Julia Hartley-Brewer to define what a woman was when he was chancellor.

Instead of offering ‘adult human female’ or a similar formulation, he replied:

‘I thought the Prime Minister answered this brilliantly in PMQs…if you look at the full thing that he said, he answered the question brilliantly and I would agree with every word that he said.’

In other words: I just do the economics, don’t ask me to think about other stuff. A spreadsheet chancellor can get away with that. A prime minister can’t.