The brutal truth is that Sunak just isn’t very good at politics. He simply can’t connect. And now, the strength of his brand – the competent technocrat – is under attack from internal enemies, who have lately stepped up a hostile briefing campaign about decision-making paralysis in Downing Street.
One minister (unnamed, of course) was quoted last week as saying: “Rishi’s selling point was supposed to be that he might be a bit crap at politics but he’s good at governing ... But Downing Street is a black hole, where policies go to die. No one can get a decision out of them.” This was echoed by several other anonymous sources.
One critic who is not anonymous is Lord Frost, formerly Boris Johnson’s chief trade negotiator and now a leading voice on the Tory right. While as recently as a couple of months ago his calls for a leadership change sounded like the rantings of a rather peculiar ex-cabinet minister, they are now being taken seriously by commentators. Backbenchers are watchful. Downing Street is on high alert.
The rationale is familiar: “Things are so bad that nothing can make them worse; a change can only make it better.”
It seldom works. It is the same argument that led the Tories to dump Johnson two years ago. It was a shocking error: Boris, for all his faults, was the master politician of his age, a mesmerising shape-shifter with an endless capacity to reinvent himself and a unique ability to reach ordinary Englishmen. Had his backbench not panicked, he would have lived down his COVID indiscretions as the news cycle moved on. Things have only gone downhill since.
Were they to be mad enough to roll Sunak, it would mean four prime ministers in less than two years. But, believe me, there are a lot of Tory MPs who are barking mad; forebodings of electoral slaughter will make them even crazier.
Would the Tories do it? My spies inside the Conservative Party tell me this is now a real possibility. Penny Mordaunt, the former defence secretary who came third in the Truss-Sunak leadership race in 2022, is said to have the numbers and “is on manoeuvres”, in the delightful English euphemism for a politician testing the waters for a leadership challenge.
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The trigger would be local government elections on May 2, at which the Tories expect to do terribly. In that event, there is the possibility – which Sunak’s people are already threatening, to keep malcontents in line – that if challenged, he would call an immediate election. (The same option was seriously considered by Malcolm Turnbull during Peter Dutton’s challenge in 2018.) This itself raises the interesting question of whether the king would give him a dissolution in such circumstances.
A new face in No. 10 would give them six months or so to reset. But the voters stopped listening a long time ago. Yet another leadership change would only prompt a public eye-roll, and confirm everything they already think about this government having run its course.
The old metaphor of rearranging the deckchairs has never been more apt.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general.
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