Allies enraged and enemies emboldened – Sunak’s
campaign is already a fiasco
Gaby
Hinsliff
The beleaguered PM maximised the only weapon he had
left – surprise. But the ruse will worsen his prospects, not improve them
Fri 24 May
2024 07.00 CEST
Cut your
losses short and let your winners run. It’s the oldest cliche on Wall Street,
and, at heart, Rishi Sunak is more of a banker than a politician. So, in
retrospect, perhaps we should have guessed how he would react to the current
collapse in the Conservative party’s share price.
His bet on
turning the country around hasn’t worked out, so he’s unwinding his position;
dumping his stocks and getting out. On Wednesday, Sunak had the air of a man
who is tired of waiting for the inevitable and would rather get it over with.
What he doesn’t seem to have realised – although judging by their seasick
expressions as they lined up behind him, plenty of his cabinet ministers have –
is how much politics is not like banking. Cutting and running now, against the
reported advice of the Tories’ election guru, Isaac Levido, is a tacit
admission that things are not going to get better; that, if anything, they are
likely to get worse. And just like that, he has effectively turned his campaign
into a public admission of failure.
By
breakfast time on day one of the campaign, Sunak had already conceded that “we
haven’t made the progress on NHS waiting lists I would have liked”, and that
flights to Rwanda would not in fact be taking off before the election. (Though
Nigel Farage isn’t formally standing for election this time, having lost seven
times in a row, expect him to make hay with that on the Reform party’s behalf
as the peak season for small boat crossings gets under way in June.) By the
afternoon, the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, was describing Boris Johnson’s
regime as “the worst governing ever seen” to the Covid inquiry, in case any
voters happened to have forgotten Partygate. It’s as though someone had
actively arranged a campaign around all the things voters are angriest about.
What next?
Well, lights are flashing red all over the criminal justice system: this week
it emerged that police chiefs privately discussed asking forces to delay
arrests because the jails were too full, thanks to the Tories failing either to
build more cell space or reform sentencing in time. Prisoners are already being
released early to ease hellish overcrowding, and from this week some sentences
will be cut short by up to 70 days, to victims’ understandable distress.
Yet this
campaign will not be a slam-dunk for Labour. For a start, all these problems
will most likely be theirs to solve by 5 July, and it may be only when and if
they get the keys to the Treasury that they understand exactly why Sunak chose
to leave when he did. Inflation is down but not necessarily out, with
speculation about an autumn rebound, and borrowing figures this month were
worse than expected. On top of everything else it will be struggling to afford,
a new Labour government will now need to find billions for the rightly generous
compensation for victims of the infected blood scandal, announced by Sunak on
what we know now was his way out of the door.
Though
Wednesday’s election announcement took them by surprise, the slickness of Keir
Starmer’s initial launch suggests his team are as ready as they’ll ever be for
a campaign they have war-gamed intensively, though they have still to finish
selecting candidates in dozens of seats (including Islington North, where
Jeremy Corbyn is tipped to run as an independent).
But Labour
thinking still looks unfinished in some key manifesto areas, the party remains
uncomfortably divided over Gaza, and Angela Rayner still faces an ongoing
police investigation into the sale of her old council house. Starmer’s rather
remote leadership style, which leaves colleagues struggling sometimes to work
out what he wants, is meanwhile a potential weakness in a campaign where snap
decisions have to be taken fast, under pressure, by a team scattered around the
country.
But for now
these problems pale in comparison with a Tory leader who pitched himself as the
man to clear up the Tory mess but is now quitting with the job at best half
finished, in order to lead his mutinous party on what looks like a suicide
mission.
By going
for the summer election almost nobody expected, Sunak maximised the one
advantage he had left, that of surprise. Yet, instead of catching his enemies
off balance, somehow he has ended up managing to wrongfoot his own side,
resulting in the kind of baffled backbench rage at Downing Street’s apparent
ineptitude that makes you wonder if the inevitable postmortem can be suppressed
until polling day.
That he
seemingly went to the palace to seek the dissolution of parliament before
telling his own cabinet what was happening is a telling illustration of how
little trust he has in his colleagues not to leak, or even try some wild
last-minute insurrection. Now the cold hard fury of some of his own MPs,
particularly those who don’t have the Sunak family riches to cushion an
expected fall, may well dog him to polling day and beyond.
But in
choosing not to hang on till the bitter end, Sunak has done the right thing for
a country that has had more than enough of all this psychodrama, and the right
thing, too, perhaps, for his family. He has made his choice, and it was to cut
his losses. Now let the winner run.
Gaby
Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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