If the lukewarm assessments of Rishi Sunak’s performance in his first year as prime minister sound a little like obituaries, it is not surprising. He has probably only got another year or so before the grim electoral reaper carries him and sheaves of his fellow Tories off into the underworld of opposition, in which no ministerial cars sweep you between engagements, no hush descends on a room when you enter it and nobody returns your calls.
When a prime minister is facing oblivion, how is he to govern? In the same way that a man should live when facing death: as best he can, by his own lights.
In some ways, Sunak has been doing that. No 10 is no longer the scene of jaw-dropping chaos, bringing joy to the journalists who feed on this stuff and consternation to all right-thinking Britons, that it was during Boris Johnson’s years. (Let’s pass silently over the Truss fleeting tenure to avoid stirring up traumatic memories.) Sunak is a good manager, as the smooth way he cleaned up the mess that Johnson had left in Northern Ireland attests. No 10 is quite boring these days.
A proud Thatcherite, Sunak has also stuck by the commitment to fiscal responsibility that won him the leadership. Government debt as a percentage of GDP is below the G7 average and falling. Despite Truss’s efforts — welcomed by some on the right of the party who have only a distant acquaintance with economic reality — to crawl out of the grave she dug herself last autumn, the noises coming out of Downing Street suggest that there won’t be any significant tax cuts in next month’s autumn statement. Meanwhile, the government is ploughing ahead with reforms to the City and pension regulation to make it easier for businesses to grow.
This is the sensible stuff that Sunak is made of. Yet it is not, if the coming year looks like the last year, what his government will be remembered for. Suella Braverman, a woman whose hunger for headlines is as boundless as her appeal to the Tory base is mysterious, has succeeded in trapping the government into banging on about immigration. Instead of explaining how he is going to make the country more prosperous, Sunak is bogged down in the management of small boats, barges and hotels.
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Sunak is uncomfortable on this territory. Homo economicus, of which he is a prime specimen, does not regard immigrants as a threat to civilisation: it sees them as by and large a good thing, contributing to GDP either by starting high-tech businesses or by increasing the supply of skilled labour. Sunak cannot with conviction speak as though his mission as prime minister was to defend this island nation from an invasion by small boats. He does not have it in him to bray, as Robert Jenrick did in parliament this week, that Sir Keir Starmer’s promised new towns would be “filled with illegal migrants”.
Yet Sunak’s fear of annihilation has made him a prisoner of the culture warriors. To shore up the Tory base and limit the scale of his defeat, he is focusing on immigration and avoiding offending nimbys. He has, in consequence, allowed Starmer to steal the clothes that suit him best.
Starmer is portraying himself as the man to vote for if you want growth. He will bypass planning restrictions and unleash a wave of construction in the country, which will increase investment, raise the growth rate and house the nation’s young people.
“Supply-side” policies of this sort, to boost growth without spending taxpayers’ money, are classic Thatcherite stuff. The blessed Margaret boosted the economy by releasing it from the bounds of regulation, state ownership and union power. Sunak, as her 21st-century heir, should be performing the same trick with the rules that make it so hard to build in Britain. Instead, he has left this Tory territory open to Labour. In both the broad sweep of supply-side economics and the implementation plan — development corporations of the sort that Michael Heseltine used in Docklands and elsewhere — Starmer is out-Thatchering Sunak.
If Sunak is to have a positive story to tell the voters at the next election, he needs to reclaim the clothes that Starmer has stolen and portray himself as the man to vote for if you want growth. It will increase his chances of getting anybody under middle age to vote for him. It will allow him to govern in a way that plays to his strengths. It is, by his own lights, the right way to run a country.
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He doesn’t need to invent a new agenda. Michael Gove, the housing secretary, laid one out in a speech in July. It envisaged a big programme for regenerating cities, promising “to intervene, using all arms of government to assemble land, provide infrastructure, set design principles, masterplan over many square miles and bring in ambitious private sector partners”. It would lose some nimby votes but need not sacrifice too many constituencies, if development were concentrated in and around Labour-dominated cities. And it would send a message to voters — especially young ones — that Tories are interested in creating and sharing prosperity, not just protecting their property and privileges.
Sunak needs to get behind the ideas that Gove expounded. The autumn statement offers the opportunity to do that. When the deals are being done in cabinet on who gets any spare cash, Sunak should shovel some in Gove’s direction to put welly into his vision.
Sunak is not going to win the next election but he can choose how he loses. He can bend to Braverman’s will or go with Gove. He can be remembered as the prime minister who focused on keeping foreigners out, or the one who reasserted the Tories’ identity as the party of growth, prosperity and home-ownership. It’s up to him.
