There is a much stronger case to be made for Rishi Sunak than one would suppose from reading the public prints. He is a man of courage, intellect and moral seriousness who does what he believes to be the right thing.
When interviewed by ConservativeHome in the summer of 2022, he made clear his commitment, on both moral and practical grounds, to sound money.
Sunak was at this time competing against Liz Truss for the votes of Conservative Party members. She promised unfunded tax cuts. He opposed them. She won the contest and rushed to make unfunded tax cuts. He has since been repairing the damage.
Sound money is a necessary condition for achieving many other things, but one cannot pretend that in itself it is a popular cause. Geoffrey Madan, a friend of Harold Macmillan, noted in 1933 the retort of a Hyde Park orator to an interrupter:
“When I hear a man talk of Sound Finance, I know him for an enemy of the people.”
Here is one reason for Sunak’s unpopularity. Although he is as tactful about it as he can be, he will not just say what people want to hear. Perhaps he should make more of a virtue of this principled intransigeance.
For it is hard to think of an occasion, either as Chancellor of the Exchequer or as Prime Minister, when he has proclaimed a crowd-pleasing target regardless of whether he thinks it can be achieved.
He could easily have won applause from those who want an increase in the defence budget if he had promised to raise it to three per cent of GDP, or indeed to five per cent.
He has instead committed himself to two and a half per cent, properly funded.
We have a Prime Minister with the courage to reject wishful thinking. As he observed in his speech last September on Net Zero,
“The Climate Change Committee have rightly said you don’t reach Net Zero simply by wishing it. Yet that’s precisely what previous governments have done – both Labour and Conservative.”
Sunak announced prudent extensions to the absurd timetable which had been adopted for such measures as getting rid of gas boilers.
When Sunak supported Vote Leave in 2016, he demonstrated his ability, having thought through the pros and cons of Brexit, to defy fashionable metropolitan opinion. At the Treasury, he resisted the fashionable view that interest rates were going to remain very low for a very long time, so now was the moment to borrow astronomical sums for infrastructure projects.
In 2014 Richmond Conservatives had the wisdom to select Sunak, despite not being local, as William Hague’s successor, and he has since got to know, esteem and indeed invoke North Yorkshire as a valuable corrective to metropolitan fads.
Here he meets farmers, and soldiers stationed at Catterick. Sunak is sceptical about trade deals in which other countries protect their farmers, while obtaining access to the British market. He is a pragmatist, not an ideologue.
“But he’s going to lose the next election!” the impatient reader may exclaim.
None of us can know for certain whether that is true, but even if it is true, the statement often carries with it the mistaken assumption that anyone who loses an election, or is on course to lose an election, should be written off as a failure.
Political journalism is reduced to a desperate attempt to pick winners. Success becomes the only measure of value. Pundits who scarcely have a conversation from one year to the next with what might be called a normal person, possibly in somewhere like North Yorkshire, instead pore over the opinion polls, and strive in this way to determine who is on course for victory.
But like the weather in these islands, popularity is changeable.
And our constitution depends on a regular supply of good losers, who accept defeat at the polls. Every politician loses at some point, and so does every political party.
We neither live, nor want to live, in a one-party state, and the longer one party has been in office, the stronger the case, as a simple matter of fairness, for giving the other lot a turn.
That is not an argument which Sunak, as leader of a party which has been in government for 14 years, can do much to oppose. He can, however, be depended upon to lose (if that is what the voters decide) with decency and decorum.
Our idea of freedom includes the freedom to sack whoever is running the show. While writing a volume of brief lives of every Prime Minister since Sir Robert Walpole, I could not help noticing that we give them an impossible job, and then blame them for failing to perform it:
“In the eighteenth century, the Prime Minister’s function was to take the blame on behalf of the monarch. Nowadays, he or she is there to take the blame on behalf of the people, and often on behalf of colleagues too. The Conservatives treated one of their most remarkable leaders, Sir Robert Peel, as a renegade, while Labour MPs came to regard Ramsay MacDonald, who had done so much to create their party, as the worst traitor of all. The role of Prime Minister is essentially a sacrificial one.”
Sunak is no more likely to escape blame than his 56 predecessors were. But if at some point between now and January he is ejected from Downing Street, I hope he confounds the aspersions of his critics and does not depart the following day for California.
After losing the general election of 2005, Michael Howard continued as leader for six months while the Conservative Party worked out how to proceed.
In the event of defeat at the next general election it would surely be a good idea to spend at least six months working out what to do, and who should try to do it.