This feels altogether too charitable to me.
After the meltdown of the Liz Truss administration, he formed a government, kept the markets happy and worked out Northern Ireland, one insider points out. If you think back to the wild moments of autumn 2022, that is no mean feat. "He followed advice to treat it like a coalition government at the start, to stabilise the ship," a former minister tells me.
Not really. All he needed to do that was to stop doing the batshit stuff that Liz Truss was doing. Literally doing nothing was enough.
Many of the sources I spoke to told me he is "the cleverest person in the room", or the "smartest person in the meeting". One of his colleagues reckons he is "frighteningly well briefed... he's unmatched".
Then why is he so terrible cringe and where are all his bright ideas ?
Rishi Sunak is an unusual politician. One example is the story of Carol and Jo. During the early part of the pandemic, Rishi Sunak made almost hourly calls to them. They were relatively junior civil servants working on designing and building the new system for furlough. This was the chancellor taking personal and painstaking care with the details of an important new policy.
Okay, micromanagement done right. But furlough wasn't an especially innovative or novel idea. Everyone else did it too, because there wasn't a realistic alternative. He may be detail-competent but it's blind to the big picture.
Some colleagues believe it was a shopping list of pledges that was never going to excite or persuade. "The five pledges were rushed out the door in January," a party veteran tells me. "He should have gone harder and bolder." After Boris Johnson’s bluster, and Liz Truss' hundred-mile-an-hour ideological experiment, Rishi Sunak’s business-like, non-ideological approach could have seemed like an advantage – thank God for a grown up, eh?
But for some, there's the problem.
"The most successful politicians at the very top level are the ones who have very strong beliefs and instincts – his approach looks like a series of transactions or problems to be solved," a former official who admires Sunak told me. Another source who worked closely with him said: "He thinks that working really hard and being good is enough. Being PM is art, not science - and he is no artist."
Well, see, everyone says how they don't know what Starmer stands for, but that's only because they haven't been paying attention. But Sunak ? I haven't got a clue what he's about. A wishlist of stuff he'd like to happen does not a plan make, let alone a vision : there isn't any underlying link between them, no coherent strategy or moral philosophy. He keeps insisting he's got a plan but I'm blowed if I know what it is. And everyone said as soon as he announced the pledges that inflation was going to come down anyway, so he can't claim credit for the one thing on his list he's actually managed to do. The other ones, especially "grow the economy" and "stop the boats" don't matter to anyone very much : "grow the economy" is far too abstract, and (worst of all) while stopping people-smuggling is a laudable goal, he's chosen to pander to the far-right racists and victim blame asylum seekers instead of going after the gangs.
Sunak "sat down in the summer to think about what his legacy should be", a minister at the time tells me. He came up with what the minister described as a series of "eclectic ideas" that included banning smoking, long-term reform of A-Levels in England and scrapping a major chunk of HS2, all co-ordinated with a big conference rebrand. Despite weeks of build-up, it fell flat.
"I don’t know a single MP who wanted to put any of those things on their leaflets. It just showed he didn't really know where he wanted to go."
"It was one of those moments where you look at it," another current cabinet minister told me, "and think I'm not sure I object to any of it, but I'm not sure I see the point of it."
Well exactly. I quite like the smoking ban but it doesn't fit into any broader whole. There doesn't appear to be any guiding mind at work in government, just random people coming up with assorted ideas across the whole parameter space of (in)competence. One of Blair's lessons was that voters judge the policies in aggregate, not individually. Sunak might be competent at detail and certainly doesn't appear to be stupid as such, but he's a vacuous non-entity when it comes to strategy.
Another former minister suggests Sunak's appeal for discipline and order in the party was destined to fall on deaf ears because many believe he was part of the effort to unseat Boris Johnson.
Many believe ??? He resigned as Chancellor - this is objective truth, not a matter of belief ! Good grief.
The common denominator of political events in the last five years is they have been hard to predict. Despite the polls it is way too soon to say its game over for Project Sunak.
Labour have had a commanding lead over the Tories for a full two years. Events might be hard to predict but the overall trend is fucking obvious. Way too soon ? What nonsense ! It's been safe to say game over for Sunak for a good long while already.
#Politics
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy6332vx5n8o