Reflections on Rishi

This country needs the man the Prime Minister pretends to be.

Last year, during the first Conservative leadership contest, I hauled myself off to some arena in London to watch the final hustings between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.

It was a fairly dispiriting event. Instead of both candidates appearing together and fielding the same questions, they came on stage one at a time and answered whatever Nick Ferrari felt like asking them.

This meant that Truss, the front-runner, managed to get away without answering a single question on housing, in a hustings held in a city in the grips of a spiralling rent crisis. The only mention of the subject on her side came when Iain Duncan Smith, her warm-up man, paused his speech to urge the gathered activists to come and help him campaign against new developments in Chingford. It was abject stuff.

Sunak, on the other hand, did get a question on housing. And you know what? Whilst I don’t recall his answer, I do recall thinking it was pretty good. Some of the policies he floated during that campaign were bad, but at least there were policies!

In fact, he was pretty good. Perhaps I read too much into one event, or maybe his act works differently in person, but I’ve never really bought the widely-held belief that the Prime Minister is bad at speechmaking. He at least knew how to work a room. Where his flow was sometimes interrupted by spontaneous applause, Truss just kept sort of freezing until people realised they were meant to clap.

It was night and day, and made the choice in the subsequent ballot an easy one.

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On Wednesday, I perched on a stool on the set of Politics Live and watched Sunak commit exactly the same political sin for which I had (rightly) written off his rival the year before: despite speaking for almost an hour, the Prime Minister didn’t mention housing once.

He had teed it up perfectly. The slogan of the conference (“Long-term decisions for a brighter future”); his new persona as the teller of hard truths, prepared to risk short-term unpopularity; his startling claim that we have been doing politics wrong for thirty years - not just at Westminster but at Holyrood, Cardiff Bay, and Stormont too!

Jaded as I am, I was genuinely fascinated as to where he was going to take that analysis. But the answer was… nowhere. Sunak didn’t offer any structural analysis of how this country is governed at all. Nor even on why Britain is so uniquely abject at delivering infrastructure projects.

(As such, there was scant reason not to suspect this smorgasbord of replacement initiatives would not befall the same fate as HS2. And lo.)

And none of the announcements he made were obviously unpopular. They were bad, sure, but that isn’t the same thing; this country is in the hole it’s in in no small part because the roots of its problems are popular with the voters.

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It was the same weird disjuncture evident in his previous speech on Net Zero. There, he again offered the start of a serious and correct analysis of what was wrong with the original policy: it was passed in an entirely unserious way, with no serious thought given to what hitting the targets would involve let alone effort to win public consent.

Yet there too he avoided the obvious conclusion. A man genuinely prepared to tell hard truths and risk unpopularity would have followed that with something like this:

“The only way we can hit our Net Zero targets is by getting the grid ready, and that means building not just new generating capacity but hundreds of thousands of kilometres of new cable. At present, it is simply too difficult and too expensive to build the power plants, pylons, and sub-stations we need - so I am going to do whatever it takes to get this vital infrastructure built.

“I know this won’t be universally popular; local infrastructure rarely is. But it is the right long-term decision, in the national interest.”

But Rishi Sunak is not that person.

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He’s scarcely alone in that, of course; few politicians of either party seem even to grasp the scale of the challenges facing this country, let alone have much by way of either solutions or the stomach for battle.

But the strange thing about Sunak is that he clearly at least knows what sort of man the moment requires. The need for tough-minded long-term thinking, the attacks on the unserious way policy is made, the need to be prepared to weather short-term unpopularity to break out of a manifestly failing consensus - all of this is true.

It’s just that he clearly has no intention of being that man. He isn’t prepared to make tough decisions about the pensions triple lock, or housing, or infrastructure - not when he can scrap a major capex project and spent almost a quarter of the savings on fixing potholes.

The dissonance between the rhetoric and the reality of Sunakism is so great as to be almost an inversion.

I don’t get it, and I’m fascinated by it. He could have chosen a framing against Labour that played more into his managerial tendencies; he instead chose to peddle a complete fiction about a tough-minded visionary - precisely the sort of tough-minded visionary that this country actually needs, but he isn’t.

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It can’t be easy to be cursed with sufficient self-awareness to understand both what the answer is and that you aren’t it. Much kinder to the psyche to be blessed with delusive self-confidence, as Truss is.

Yet a braver man would at least try to rise to the occasion. Twenty points down in the polls, with a year to go and a majority in Parliament, is actually quite a liberating position in terms of getting things done (Labour didn’t pass the Equality Act until 2010). There are plenty of bullets to be bitten and time enough to bite them.

But Rishi Sunak is not that person.