Sunak has united conservatives but not how he hoped

Why are the Conservatives doing quite so badly? Smashed in two by-elections, dropping further in the polls, last days of the Roman Empire on the backbenches, morale and purpose visibly ebbing away.

Partly it must be because Rishi Sunak has been unveiled as a nerd rather than an authoritative national leader. Banging on about gobbledegook AI plans, ideas for reforming A-levels a decade down the line and the removal of the right to smoke via a too-clever-by-half moving age limit. Beware of geeks bearing grifts, as someone almost said. 

But I suggest there is a more fundamental reason why Tory poll ratings are down to the mid-twenties and so many habitual Conservative voters cannot be bothered turn out for the party. It is simply this: a year into the Sunak administration, there is almost no point in voting Conservative.

This is not a generalised gripe but a very specific observation. Imagine for a moment that you are a centrist-minded voter, who is content to tolerate the Westminster consensus on high immigration, staying within the European Convention on Human Rights and sticking to the basic Net Zero timetable. You’re happy continuing with the bloated foreign aid budget, taking a ‘balanced’ approach on culture war issues and waiting for modest tax cuts until they become ‘affordable’.

In that case you might as well vote for Keir Starmer, or even his mini-me Ed Davey. The Labour leader may be as slippery as a bar of soap in a bath, but he is clearly no Jeremy Corbyn. Extreme leftism is off the agenda. Giving the Tories a bloody nose, which you probably think they richly deserve, now seems like a safe thing to do.

Now imagine you are a more full-blooded Conservative who yearns for drastic cuts to immigration, to leave the ECHR so Britain can finally clamp down on illegal migration and to substantially extend the Net Zero transition period. You want to slash foreign aid, to take on the woke left on every issue from militant trans to the failure of crude multiculturalism and to slash welfare spending in order to fund tax reductions that incentivise wealth-creation. What has the Tory party got to offer you? 

The answer, again, is very little. Many Tory MPs favour mass immigration, despite the party’s prime ministers often pretending not to. This has been true for all of them this century, from Cameron to May, Johnson to Truss and on to Sunak as well. The government’s economic projections are based on net immigration continuing to run at about a quarter of a million annually.

You may also recall that a couple of months back Tory MPs on the left of the party signalled that they will block any move to leave the ECHR. Dozens of Tory Reform Group and One Nation parliamentarians will put the mockers on that, rather like they tried to do on Brexit. So even if a miracle occurs and Sunak scrapes a win at the next election, getting a grip on illegal migration will remain out of reach.

You will also have noted the extent of the rage when Sunak took the tiniest step away from a couple of components of the Net Zero obligations. From May to Johnson, from Zac Goldsmith to Ben Gummer, there was unalloyed fury. Likewise on foreign aid, which the Andrew Mitchell brigade views as ‘seeking to balance the books on the backs of some of the poorest people in the world’. Blah, blah, blah.

On the social and cultural front, one reads that Sunak is about to legislate to ban so-called ‘conversion therapy’ – a liberal left hobby horse measure that may stop concerned professionals advising young people convinced they are trapped in the wrong body to think again. Dozens of Tory MPs, from Penny Mordaunt downwards, seem to spend much of their time preventing their party from resisting the onward march of the identitarian left.

When it comes to tax and spend, you will probably by now suspect that Labour’s Rachel Reeves will be unlikely to depart significantly from Jeremy Hunt’s balefully cautious approach (after all, copying other people seems to be rather her forte). A Tory party that pushed up out-of-work benefits by ten per cent when wages were only rising by five per cent is hardly going to be on the side of the grafters anytime soon, after all.

So again, why bother voting Conservative when the best you can hope for is that a phalanx of Tory ‘progressives’ will end up holding the balance of power in the Commons? Why not instead just sit on your hands and let the party take a pasting and be replaced by an alternative that seems only very marginally worse? Or why not indeed vote with your heart for the insurgent right-wing party Reform, as crucial numbers did at the recent by-elections? At least you can then hope to see a clear-out of the current crop of Conservative MPs and perhaps a re-alignment on the Right afterwards.

Loathed by centrists despite all the olive branches, despised by right-wingers thanks to all the let-downs, Sunakism has succeeded in uniting the Tory tribes in only one respect: their wish to see the back of this iteration of Conservatism.