The politicians who leave their stamp on history, rather than the reverse, have a story to tell voters: a plan for the challenges facing the country and how they can be met.
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have been the two great weather-makers and election winners of recent times. Unlike both of them, Rishi Sunak has come to Downing Street near the end of a fourth term of government for his party.
But though without the luxury of having built up his position in Opposition, the Prime Minister is like them in that he, too, must tell a story if he’s to prove a winner. He seems recently to have accepted the point.
Today’s media is full of stories about his campaigning plans over the summer in the wake of Labour’s rebuff last week by the voters of Uxbridge.
But his real and perhaps final opportunity to cut through to voters will be at and after this autumn’s Conservative Party Conference. What tale should he tell?
Sunak is in the daunting and lonely position of having to decide himself. He has no shortage of advice from others – including this website.
But the worst course he could take is to spin a story that he doesn’t have his heart in. Voters would spot the inauthenticity at once.
His opponents caricature him as better with spreadsheets than speeches. Nonetheless, he will find, if he thinks about it, that he has been telling a story for quite some time. He just hasn’t yet made the most of it.
Ever since he was ushered in as Chancellor, Sunak has been preoccupied with inflation. As Chancellor, he thought the Bank of England was soft on it. As a Conservative leadership contender, he thought that Liz Truss was weak on it.
The Thatcherite lesson of the 1980s is that low inflation is a non-negotiable condition for economic credibility. He could truthfully remind voters that his judgement call has been proved right.
But though bringing inflation down is a necessary start to his plan it is not of itself a sufficient whole. The Prime Minister’s bent will be to go upbeat about Britain’s excellence in life sciences, the creative industries, financial services, green investment.
It would be no bad thing to get voters to think about who better grasps the challenge of new technologies, in our regionalising and insecure world: Keir Starmer or Sunak himself?
However, banging on about science won’t get to the essence of the problem facing Britain. Boiled down to its essence, it divides into three parts.
First, the economic: not only that growth is too low, but that the proceeds of growth haven’t been shared fairly. Second, the cultural, driven by demographic decline.
And finally, the political: the vague but powerful sense among a mass of unengaged voters that our politicians simply aren’t up to scale of the difficulties we face.
The Prime Minister can’t address all this at once: indeed, the electorate isn’t yet ready, if it ever will be, to face up to some elements of the problem – such as the monopoly that older people are gaining on ownership and capital.
However, he could begin with his own sphere, the political, by identifying a key source of voters’ disillusion with conventional politics and their sense of powerlessness.
There is permanent tension in any democracy about political power. Should it lie primarily with people we elect, such as MPs? Or with those we don’t (such as judges)?
Different answers are given in different times. During the late 1970s, some Conservatives, such as Lord Hailsham, worried about the potential tyranny of a House of Commons dominated by governments that lacked majority support among voters.
It’s no coincidence that the Government of the day was Labour. Today, its successor is Tory, and roles have been reversed: now it’s Labour that fulminates against executive power – Covid contracts, Richard Sharp at the BBC, Lords’ appointments.
Nonetheless, a fair-minded person would recognise a shift in political muscle over the past quarter century from those we elect to those we don’t.
Consider the drivers of three recent news items: Nigel Farage v Coutts, Uxbridge v Ulez and teachers v chaos. It wasn’t MPs who shut down Farage’s account. It was woke bankers muscling in on the public square.
It wasn’t Ministers who gave the thumbs-up to ULEZ expansion. It was a Mayor of London driven by environmental lobbyists. And it isn’t politicians who call the shots on how teachers should best negotiate managing trans in schools: it’s lawyers.
You will reply that Conservative-led governments have failed since 2010 to overhaul equality laws – and you will be right. But that doesn’t disprove the drift of events.
Two centuries ago, William Cobbett raged against “The Thing” – the establishment of his day. Today, its nearest equivalent is less our media-battered politicians – those “politically exposed persons” – than what some on the right call The Blob.
It may be more meaningful to see it as a kind of Ascendancy: a new ruling class of cartel capitalists, change-resistant public services, quangocrats, regulators, government-funded lobbyists and expanding judicial review.
This modern Thing has skin in the game of growing the state, because it depends for what it does on government activity – and the taxes that fund it. But it has less of a stake in preserving the nation, since it tends to identify with its equivalents abroad.
No wonder it finds itself uncomfortable at the least with Sunak’s pledge to stop the boats. Which takes us back to whatever story he may now wish to tell voters – his view of the challenges facing the country and how they should be met.
What’s coming out of Downing Street since last week’s by-elections suggests that he recognises the causes of the plight I describe.
He will worry about saying so, since claims of culture war would follow. But at its heart, the central matter for politicians is less culture, for which they have limited responsibility, than control, for which they have much more, given Parliamentary sovereignty.
“Look, I’m a new kid on the block,” the Prime Minister could say. “I haven’t been in Parliament for all that long. As Chancellor, I had to cope with Covid and furlough. And I’ve been in Number Ten for less than year.”
“Setting out my priorities has allowed me to take a good look under the bonnet. What I’ve found isn’t pretty. The British people made a big decision seven years ago to take back control.”
“But you don’t take back control by handing the streets to Just Stop Oil, women’s sports to men, policing to banks (at least when comes to their customers’ views)…and losing control of our borders.”
“I’ve a plan to put these mistakes right, and you won’t just make a judgement on it next year. You’ll face a choice between me and Keir Starmer.”
“Which will strike the right balance between reducing emissions and protecting livelihoods? Me, or Starmer, with Ed Miliband round the Cabinet table?”
“Whose record is tougher on crime? Who grew up with their family working in NHS? Which of us does the SNP believe more likely to concede a referendum that could break up Britain?”
“Who is more set on controlling inflation, or understands business better? Which of us would be more likely to stop the boats? Me, the man with a plan. Or my opponent, who has no alternative.”
Mind you, Sunak will have to show as well as tell in the little time he has left. That means having a Plan B if the Supreme Court or the ECtHR rules against the Rwanda scheme.