Sunak Has To Be Bold To Achieve Electoral Success – OpEd

By Chris Doyle*

Just over 10 weeks ago, Rishi Sunak undertook an improbable journey from an audience with King Charles III to entering one of the most famous doors in the world. In becoming Britain’s third prime minister of 2022, he became the first British Asian to hold the keys to Downing Street and perhaps also the richest PM in British history.

Sunak may have tripped over the poisoned chalices left behind the door. Liz Truss left him in charge of a Conservative Party lagging 27 points behind Labour in the polls — a gap that remains at more than 20 points. The economy is creaking, with spiraling inflation and burgeoning debt. He has a chancellor who had already laid out financial plans based on yet another bout of austerity, which was perhaps responsible but dubious in terms of being a vote-winner.

Britain has also been facing huge public sectors strikes, which for the first time include nurses and ambulance drivers. With the huge rise in the cost of living, workers are unsurprisingly demanding pay rises. But what can the government realistically afford? Sunak yearns for public sector pay restraint, but can he afford to ignore public sentiment?

Perhaps the most serious crisis he inherited is the disaster zone that is the National Health Service. Hospitals are in a parlous condition. Waiting times have shot up. Hospital corridors have become wards. Patients are dying who should not have. None of this was helped by having four health secretaries in six months, but a mix of long-term underinvestment and the impact of COVID-19 has brought what used to be the pride of the nation to its knees. Radical reform and a shake-up are vital, but how?

Immigration remains one of the most charged issues on the British political scene. Sunak has stuck to the uncompromising lines of his predecessors. Much of this is managerial, such as how to cut the logjam of asylum applications, but also highly visual, as even in the height of winter boatloads of migrants, including genuine refugees, cross the English Channel from France. They do so at the mercy of reprehensible people smugglers who have little care for their safety. Sunak’s pledge is to “stop the boats,” but as yet any solution seems distant.

This is the backdrop to the start of 2023. Both Sunak and his Labour opponent Keir Starmer barely recovered from the new year festivities before making set-piece speeches outlining their vision for the country. Neither leader hit the heights and few were satisfied.

Sunak’s pitch was hardly inspiring or bold, but had the merit of being simple and clear. Five basic pledges, including halving inflation and growing the economy. Yet, for many people, this will be seen as a gimmick, not a strategy. Who would not want to grow the economy? The question is how?

In many ways, Sunak remains a blank script. As far as the voting public is concerned, his vision for the country is unclear. At the moment, he looks safe merely in that he is neither Truss, who wrecked the economy in a couple of weeks, nor Boris Johnson, whose tenure was akin to a clown heading a circus.

Sunak does not lead a party that is all the same political hue. Like his predecessors, he has to keep the ever-fractured Conservative tribes content. Brexit still looms as an issue, with the right of the party insisting that remaining EU-era laws have to be ditched by the end of the year. Not only does he have to compete with the ideological camps of the far-right euroskeptics and the one-nation Tories, but he also has rivals with almost cult-like followings who hawkishly watch for any opportunity to press their agendas. Sunak cannot afford to maintain his ideological vacuum. If he does not outline a compelling vision, then others will.

Much of the Tory party still drinks from the poisoned chalice of Johnson. Memories are so short-lived. In a world of doom and gloom, some yearn for his so-called boosterism, his talent for appearing cheery and positive regardless of the orgy of disasters encircling him. Few remember the chaos. Many still genuinely believe that, if the Conservatives fare badly in the May 4 local elections, Johnson will be their savior, a hero to carry them to a general election victory that lesser Tory mortals like Sunak could never achieve. That Johnson has stayed in parliament and intends to fight for his seat at the next election indicates strongly that he buys into this too.

Reverting to Johnson would make the No. 10 occupancy a veritable merry-go-round. Sunak is the fifth prime minister since 2016, so having another leader pushed off the carousel would hardly look inspiring.

If Sunak’s domestic agenda is unclear and risk-averse, his international policy is even more so. Sunak has shown little interest in foreign affairs. His background is in business and finance. An early sign of his indifference was his original decision not to attend COP27 in Egypt, reversing this only at the last moment. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has laid out the government’s priorities for the global scene, but it was doused in realpolitik, promising no grand vision of world affairs, only a very focused attempt to build relations with allies.

Sunak and Cleverly have, perhaps wisely, shifted away from the simplistic world vision of Truss. She constantly referenced Britain’s support for democracies against dictatorships. It looked fine as she mounted a tank in Ukraine to pose, Margaret Thatcher-like, as a defender of freedom, but could never be sustained when considering all the UK’s relations with different types of government the world over. It was always more of a soundbite than a coherent strategy. Sunak and Cleverly have made it clear that they will deal with the world as it is, not as they might wish it to be.

There is every reason to see Britain in 2023 picking up after an embarrassingly disastrous 2022. The question will be how far and how fast. The challenge for Sunak is that he has to make the change up and fast. He has to alter the narrative and make voters believe that the Conservative Party is not suffering from political senescence after 12 years in power. Starmer is out in front and, if nothing major changes, then he will be the next prime minister in late 2024 or early 2025. Safe and sensible will not work for the Conservatives. Risks will need to be taken considering where the country is. This is not the time for equivocation. The question is, will Sunak be prepared to gamble?

• Chris Doyle is director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, in London. Twitter: @Doylech