6 July 2023
Sunak’s Sweet Spot
Only a beginning.
By John Watson
Many of us have spent time over the last few weeks listening to the first test matches of the Ashes series and those who have will know that, when a batsman comes in, the commentators discuss his strengths and weaknesses. “Ah, he has always been vulnerable to the short ball” will say one. “He is particularly strong against swing”, will say another. There are lots of permutations and combinations but in the end the success or failure of the batsman will depend upon whether the conditions and the state of the game result in his being served up with the bowling against which he thrives or whether they will conspire to prevent him performing at his best.
It is the same with politicians. Some of them are instinctive war leaders and perform well against a background of military conflict. Churchill fell into that category; so did Chatham; so did Palmerston. Others do not have the ruthlessness to star at this sort of work. Perhaps their forte is in peacemaking and compromise. Think Tony Blair whose real achievements were in Ireland. Think the highly consensual John Major.
The luckiest politicians are those who find that the issues facing them are well suited to their talents and in this respect Rishi Sunak is fortunate indeed. The biggest political issue facing the country at the moment is that of interest rates and inflation and his government will be judged by history on whether it makes the right calls. Those won’t necessarily be the most popular calls – a refusal to grant relief to mortgage borrowers is bound to cause suffering and popular outcry. Nor will it be possible to distance the current crisis from the decisions of his predecessors on quantitative easing where his reputation is likely to be tainted by association. But nonetheless the nation is worried and if he can return the economy to stability he will rise hugely in the esteem of the electorate. How lucky, then, that financial engineering is his expertise, a subject on which he can speak with real authority in the House of Commons. The ball has arrived in his sweet spot and if he can middle it without making a mess of it his stock will rise.
But a display of expertise in the management of the economy by the Premier may not be enough to revive the fortunes of his party because however much one may think – and I think that most people do think this – that he is a decent and clever man doing a serious job, one also has to look at those behind him and there the picture is not particularly bright. Certainly there some useful people, Hunt and Gove, for example, but although the disappearance of Johnson may have helped there are also plenty, particularly on the right of the party, whose incessant pressing of their own agenda can only be an obstruction to the government.
There is nothing wrong with there being factions within a ruling party, of course. In a democracy like ours they are wholly inevitable. Sometimes these arise from differences in principle. Remember the difficulty which the Major government had with Tory MPs opposed to the EU. Remember the “Tory wets” of the Thatcher era. Sometimes it is a reflection of the representative nature of the system. MPs from coal mining districts may not be friendly to the green agenda, for example. Either way, one of the hardest jobs of a government is to keep dissident groups under control and prevent them doing mischief to the public administration. That is not always easy to do and can backfire. After all it was in an attempt to crush anti-EU factions that David Cameron called the Brexit referendum.
When, probably sometime in 2024, the public has to make its choice between the Tories and a Labour administration, it needs to look beyond the relative merits of Sunak and Starmer as men, and even the policies they are promoting. Whether either of them can deliver a good administration will depend, not just on their political beliefs, but on whether they can carry their parties with them. Has Labour tamed the left? I am sure Sir Keir would like us to look at his firmness with Corbyn and to draw the conclusion that he has his extremists well reined in. Sunak probably has the harder job in proving that he has curbed the Trussite tendency. Either way the electorate will want to feel that the new leader will be able to deliver on his agenda cleanly without having it wrecked from within his own side.
So where does that leave the other parties, the Liberal Democrats, the Scots Nats and the various tribes of Northern Ireland? They must all be hoping to hold the balance of power and those who remember the role of the Northern Irish in obstructing Mrs May’s deal with the EU will recall how damaging that can be. The advantage of the first past the post system is that it usually gives the government power to impose a coherent approach and in times of national crisis that is imperative. Let us hope that in 2024 it gives either Mr Starmer or Mr Sunak a clear majority but not such a big one the it allows dissident groups in the ruling party to derail its policies.
