by Let me take you back, if you can bear it, to the Tory leadership election in the summer of 2022.
It’s the last week of July. Rishi Sunak turns up in a Barbour jacket – with leafy scenery in the background – talking about the “incredibly valuable” green belt. Using “green belt land for development” is not acceptable, he says. If the Tories are elected as the leader of the people, and therefore prime minister, “it will end”.
It was the strangest of sights. As Chancellor, Sunak enjoyed a great reputation within the Treasury. He was consistently praised during his tenure at No. 11 for understanding the UK’s productivity problems – and certainly the laws of supply and demand – better than most.
When did he become an enthusiastic defender of the so-called green belt, which swallows up prime development sites? What incentive could he have to protect unproductive agricultural land and abandoned car parks, rather than building new houses?
It was a strategy we have come to know in this general election: drama to the bottom.
The first major poll of the leadership campaign had dropped the previous week, showing Liz Truss leading the race. A day later, the Barbour was out in full swing.
Although Sunak managed to close the gap in the polls between himself and Truss, he still lost decisively in the leadership election. It wasn’t until Truss’ Prime Ministership came to an end – and Sunak’s warnings about his agenda of creating borrowing and spending quickly and spectacularly proved correct – that he got his chance at No. 10.
But has the real Rishi Sunak been shown in the last 20 months? Was he the classic liberal and fiscal hawk he set up as the Tories?
He tied his own hands on housing during the leadership race, which meant there was little he could do to signal any sort of house building initiative once he took office. Instead, he had to scrap housing targets, because the Nimbys in his own party managed to force his hand.
And what about inflation, the biggest domestic crisis in the last three years? Sunak knew better than anyone that it was a phenomenon that was beyond most governments’ ability to control. He was one of the few people in the UK, after all, to predict a price spiral, using his Budget back in March 2021 to try to protect the public finances from what was about to happen who hit
However he spent his time in banking No. 10 on the idea that the lowering of inflation could be attributed to actions taken by his government – which did not cause a bounce in the polls. The news this week that inflation returned to its target in May should have been a heartbreaking moment. But the event passed, relatively quietly, as people continue to feel the effects of the price increases that have slowed pace.
This government has not been loved for its handling of the inflation crisis – but it shouldn’t be. Sunak knew all too well in the Treasury that he had no control (that’s a matter for the Bank of England). The most it could do was mitigate the effects of higher borrowing costs.
Of course, there are certain policies that are harder to talk about when you have the top job – made even harder in an election year. Nobody would realistically expect, for example, that the Tories would scrap the triple lock on the state pension so close to an election.
But how did Sunak end up being a politician who proposed “green plus” which will increase the tax threshold for pensioners but not for workers? This is the same man who, when he was Chancellor, led the charge to reform the triple lock during the Covid: an opportunity, according to him and other Tories, to address its cost and generational inequality to a generation too.
Just as Barbour didn’t sit well with voters in the summer of 2022, many of Sunak’s current policies don’t sit right now. Part of the problem is that much of what has been done in the last 20 months has been exaggerated: the Conservatives are not “cutting taxes” as they claim, but raising the burden to a record high.
The cuts to National Insurance (a tax Sunak tried to increase as chancellor; then focused mainly on cuts as prime minister) only make up a quarter of the money raised by freezing tax thresholds.
But this wider effort – to say what this government thinks voters want to hear – explains the odd mix of proposals in the Tory manifesto. From National Service to a hard limit on migration figures, these are not policies that are authentic for the Prime Minister.
The irony of all this is that the public tends to respond well to Sunak when he is clearly passionate about what he is advocating. The only time during his Presidency when the polls seemed to start to change was when he delayed some net-zero targets for cars and heat pumps. It wasn’t the easiest argument to make, but the Prime Minister was in his element – tackling the cost of living crisis – and the public seemed to agree.
Even in this week’s BBC Question Time special, the only applause Sunak received came after a blunt remark from the Prime Minister – the kind he doesn’t usually let slip. “I was right” he said, without any hesitation, about his decision to stand by Truss’s spending plans. “What Keir Starmer is promising you is the same fantasy as Liz Truss.”
Some fund managers are suggesting that Labor will have a freer hand in borrowing than imagined: a significant claim, given the latest debt projections, which show a net debt of over £3 trillion by the end of the first another parliament. Sunak knows from experience which way to go. His attempt to warn against such things, as uncommon as they may be, is when he works best – and gets the best response.
There are unexpected similarities between the 2022 leadership election and this general election. If the polls are correct, Sunak will lose – again. And unless the next government finds a magic money tree, its warnings about the next thing are likely to be prescient – again.
One has to wonder why Prime Minister Sunak did not allow these insights to emerge during his Prime Ministership. It might lead to different results.
Kate Andrews is Economics Editor at The Spectator
