Poor Rishi Sunak. Within two months the Chancellor has gone from someone confident enough to publicly rebuke the Prime Minister over his choice of words to someone who merely seeks to ape them.
‘I wouldn’t have said it,’ Sunak grandly told a press conference at the start of February when asked about Boris Johnson’s jibe that Keir Starmer had failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile. That intervention came just minutes after Johnson had suffered the resignation of his policy chief Munira Mirza, whose husband is a close friend of Sunak’s.
Events were on such a trajectory that much of Westminster, possibly including Sunak himself, expected him to be ushering in yet another new Tory era by now in the wake of Johnson’s defenestration.
But it didn’t happen. Instead, it is Sunak who has lost face and status. So much so that when asked a disarmingly simple question about what a woman is by the radio broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer this week, all he could think to reply was:
The smoothy chops Chancellor would do well to cut down for now on his ‘poseable doll’ Instagram portraits
‘I thought the Prime Minister answered this brilliantly in PMQs this week and I fully agree with him…I would exactly agree with what the Prime Minister said…look at the full thing that he said. He answered the question brilliantly and I agreed with every word that he said.’
From ‘I wouldn’t have said it’ to ‘whatever he said’ in double-quick time. Sunak is clearly back in the ‘Yes Man’ mode that has endeared him to successive Tory leaders during his climb up the greasy pole of politics.
In case anyone was in any doubt that the usual pecking order had been re-established, Johnson was merrily big-footing Sunak’s spring financial statement the very next day, proclaiming: ‘As we go forward, we need to do more.’
And no wonder. Because the media reaction to the Chancellor’s statement – among friend as well as foe – was distinctly underwhelming. It was generally regarded as not having met the scale of the living standards challenge hitting millions of families. And its failure to contain any measure to help those relying on benefits to meet their bills was seen as a staggering oversight.
Tim Montgomerie, a commentator and old university friend of Sajid Javid – the man Sunak replaced at the Treasury – put it as follows:
‘The richest MP in the Commons does nothing for people on benefits during the worse cost of living crisis of modern times. It’s extraordinary.’
Instant polling by Opinium found that the Tories had managed to lose their traditional lead on perceived economic competence too.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, even the slick PR operation that surrounds Sunak started to misfire, putting out a photo of him filling up a Sainsbury worker’s car – a modest Kia Rio – as if it were his own. Subsequent footage showed the Chancellor struggling to use a contactless bank card at the till and then debate turned to whether a man whose family purchases several different types of bread can possibly understand the lives of the scrimping classes.
Just as many observers predicted, writing huge cheques to people during the emergency phase of Covid has turned out to be much easier than managing the cost-of-living crunch that has followed. Yet it is too soon to write Sunak off as a flash in the pan to be filed alongside the Cleggmania of the 2010 election campaign or other nine-day wonders. He remains the bookies’ favourite to be next Tory leader and is still one of the most fluent political communicators around.
It is still possible – though not now at all likely – that Johnson will be gone before the next election and there is no obvious heir apparent around the Cabinet table. A spell of solid achievement at the Treasury – presiding over strengthening public finances and seeing the country through to the end of the inflationary spike – could still leave Sunak well placed to succeed.
But it’s certainly not going to be the dispiritingly effortless ascent that it was starting to look like. The smoothy chops Chancellor would do well to cut down for now on his ‘poseable doll’ Instagram portraits.
It may well be that the times call for something a bit more gritty and a bit more real. Just as his petrol station montage was flopping, another minister was doing very nicely out of a photocall. Levelling-Up Minister Kemi Badenoch went back to McDonalds to flip some burgers, telling her Twitter followers: ‘Working there and doing an apprenticeship got me started in life.’ She’ll be able to answer Ms Hartley-Brewer’s question when she’s asked it too.
It’s a long game again and suddenly Rishi Sunak’s challenge is just to stay in it.
Comments