It is hard to think of a prime minister in modern times who has entered office in less politically propitious circumstances than Rishi Sunak.
The big picture is very bad. As the economist Adam Tooze has argued, it may well be much bleaker than that faced by politicians in the Seventies, widely considered the classical era of British decline.
Sunak faces an economy and wages which have been genuinely stagnant for a long time, and a set of deep structural problems for which there are no easy solutions, not least because many of the root causes are popular with the electorate and especially with the Tory electorate.
But the tactical political battlefield is also deeply unpromising, and not just because, in the aftermath of Liz Truss, it resembles a smoking crater with the debris of the Government’s credibility scattered about it.
The Prime Minister has taken office at the tail end of a Parliament; the exigencies of the pandemic mean there is not a lot of public money to play with; and he seems to have felt the need to inherit much of his Cabinet, including his Chancellor.
He has also mostly inherited his legislative agenda; even were he inclined to try and put meat on the bones of a Sunakism (and there’s no sign of that) there is simply no time or space to implement a different programme by the next election.
Were one trying to design a Westminster analogue of the Kobayashi Maru, closing a 20-point poll deficit from this starting point might be it.
One thing you might add would be having no majority – but as events are demonstrating, Sunak doesn’t really have one. On planning reform, onshore wind, and now the Online Safety Bill, it isn’t proving difficult to cobble together enough Tory MPs to wreck any given piece of legislation.
The row over the Online Safety Bill also encapsulates the broader challenge facing successive British governments: the temptation of MPs to impose laws and regulations on an issue-by-issue basis, versus the impact of the accumulated weight of all this on the British economy.
In this case, what rebels such as Miriam Cates and Simon Fell are demanding is that senior executives at social media companies be made personally, criminally liable for failing to ensure that laws governing unsafe content are properly enforced on their platforms.
This isn’t absurd, on the face of it. The best way to ensure anything is enthusiastically enforced is to have clear, personal consequences for the people best positioned to enforce it if it isn’t.
But it was rejected during the Bill’s consultation stage on the grounds that it would make the UK’s tech sector, which we are trying to grow, less competitive. Executives and investors alike would understandably be wary about committing to a jurisdiction with unusually broad exposure to criminal prosecution, and the impact would be less investment, less growth, and fewer jobs.
However, these losses are largely abstract and, by dint of residing down paths not taken, intangible – a weakness they share with the dividends of building houses, investing in nuclear, expanding our airports, and so on, and on, and on. Whereas the harms of failing to police online spaces are, at least at their most tragic, very tangible indeed, even if the overall gain doesn’t match the diffuse benefits of growth.
Moreover, the people who are concretely penalised by the proposed amendments, tech executives, are not an especially sympathetic demographic. “Think of Nick Clegg!” is no Conservatives’ idea of a rallying cry.
For Sunak, the temptation must be to give in? He has not previously shown much appetite for picking a fight with his backbenchers, even when, as on planning reform, Labour votes were potentially available. And the Bill is not, after all, his baby.
Moreover, it has nothing much to do with the five promises he made to the nation early this month. If Downing Street is looking to zero in on tightly-defined and deliverable goals – scrape the barnacles off the boat, as it were – extended trench warfare over Boris Johnson’s legislative programme isn’t obviously an attractive use of time or political capital.
And lo, we have media reports that ministers are seeking a deal with the rebels.
In theory, rolling over ought to be no guarantee of a quiet life. For the Online Safety Bill does anger another prominent part of the Conservative coalition, namely the libertarian bit, where concerns about freedom of speech meet a preoccupation with growth.
Yet in the wake of the Truss collapse, that section of the party has rather had the wind taken out of its sails. However, this imbalance of organisation may not last: the Times reports that next week will see the launch of a new Trussite caucus, apparently backed by more than 40 MPs.
Once that gets off the ground, it will provide yet another vector along which the Government’s paper majority can dissolve, and restrict the Prime Minister’s room for manoeuvre even further.
All the more reason, perhaps, for Sunak to cut his deals whilst he can. It has been a long time since British governments consistently took a long-term approach to governing, after all – and few leaders have been worse positioned to so than he.