Growing doubts have in recent days been expressed about Rishi Sunak as a parliamentarian. There was anger at Westminster that he skipped PMQs on Wednesday, making the feeble excuse that he must attend an NHS service.
According to Jason Groves, writing in yesterday’s Daily Mail, Sunak “complains to colleagues that the preparation needed” for PMQs is a “‘time sink’ that wipes out almost a day each week.”
A Conservative MP familiar with preparation for PMQs told ConHome that to begin with it does indeed require a large amount of time, as the new Prime Minister absorbs the remarkably thorough briefing he or she is given on every aspect of Government policy.
But most of that policy does not change from week to week, and in due course, this source estimated, a couple of hours should be sufficient.
Whatever the length of preparation time, the Commons does not like to feel it is being treated as unimportant.
Sunak has sunk too in the esteem of ConHome readers – see our most recent Cabinet League Table – and the press. Here is the sketchwriter Simon Carr, canvassed on Wednesday as he sat in the Commons Press Gallery, on Sunak:
“He’s pretty good. I can’t fault him. If only he was six inches taller and 50 pounds heavier he’d be of prime ministerial timber. He’s a lovely little pixie. He sprinkles pixie dust over the Commons.”
MPs dislike it if the Prime Minister bridles when awkward questions are put to him. Tory MPs find Sunak “very thin-skinned”, and the press has started to notice this too, notably on Tuesday when he faced hostile questioning in the Liaison Committee from Chris Bryant.
Rob Hutton, sketchwriter of The Critic, told ConHome:
“He’s snippy, and getting more so. You saw in the Liaison Committee, sticking his head back when someone reminds him about one of the many things he doesn’t like to be reminded about. Basically he’s a snippy teenager.”
John Crace, sketchwriter of The Guardian, took up the thought:
“A Goldman Sachs master of the universe. He’s just not used to being questioned about anything. He’s used to people just accepting what he says. That’s why he’s snippy.”
The high abilities which took Sunak to the prime ministership are still there, and are of value to him when he appears before MPs. Quentin Letts, sketchwriter of The Times, wrote of his performance before the Liaison Committee:
“Sunak’s brain changed gear noiselessly. His depth of detail was boggling. Statistics and policy positions and Whitehall initiatives streamed out of him.”
He has more than held his own against the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer. Henry Deedes, sketchwriter for The Daily Mail, told ConHome:
“He can think on his feet, which Starmer can’t.”
As Prime Minister one often gets asked questions which are unanswerable, or which would, at least, prove embarrassing if one were to attempt a straight answer. Deedes said of Sunak:
“He avoids them by such a distance that it rather looks like he doesn’t know how to do it naturally.
“He’s not really a politician. He’s not terribly sure what he’s there for, or what he represents. So he tends to give every question a wide berth. Blair could engage with them to an extent.”
Blair often conceded, with a rueful, self-deprecating joke, that the questioner had a point, before turning the tables by recasting the whole topic in a manner more favourable to himself.
Every Prime Minister has to discover what works for him or her, and at first it seemed Sunak had managed to do this with remarkable speed.
He built on his success as Chancellor: when delivering his first Budget on 11th March 2020, just under a month after unexpectedly taking over from Sajid Javid, he displayed no nerves, but (as I noted on ConHome) an astonishing technical mastery of his brief, along with a willingness to announce measures which the Opposition would have been happy to announce:
“Sunak declared in a straight rather than a cynical tone that the Government is mobilising the full resources of the Treasury in order to bring tangible benefits to the Labour voters who voted Tory in [the general election in] December [2019].
“’The Conservatives – the real Workers’ Party,’ as he put it. Labour’s clothes have been stolen by a Chancellor who sounds like a pillar of rectitude rather than a thief.”
During the Covid pandemic, then just beginning, Sunak spent vast sums of money on the swiftly devised and implemented furlough scheme, doing at least as much as Labour would have done, if not more.
At the root of his present troubles lies the end of easy money, replaced by the rising interest rates needed to bring inflation down.
It is harder, under these circumstances, to be popular. When he first became Prime Minister, on 25th October 2022 – how long ago that now seems – it was enough to be neither Liz Truss nor Boris Johnson.
Compared to either Truss or Johnson Sunak looked prudent, and conveyed a wonderful calm:
“Rishi Sunak arrived in the Chamber for his first PMQs in the expectation that he would enjoy himself. No sign of a new boy’s nerves, that disabling fear of not knowing how to behave…
“The new Prime Minister kept breaking into a smile. He evinced the confidence of a victor who believes he knows what to do, or at least what to say for the next half hour, and feels himself to be among friends, with even the SNP just waiting to be won over by his charm.
“What a contrast to last week, when Conservative MPs listened in hopeless and embarrassed silence to Liz Truss. Now they had a leader they could cheer, who held out hope of raising their spirits by walking all over Sir Keir Starmer.”
Sunak has not, in the eight months since, walked all over Starmer, but he has more than held his own against him.
The House is no longer crammed full for PMQs, for the two of them have become dull: Starmer the pious North London lawyer cannot even enthuse his own backbenchers, who watch him in listless silence, with only the women on the front bench managing a pretence of admiration, while wondering (who wouldn’t?) how they might do better.
Sunak too does not enthuse his own backbenchers. Here is one of his weaknesses as a parliamentarian, and as a speaker generally.
The Prime Minister lacks the ability to “make the weather”, the quality Winston Churchill attributed to Joe Chamberlain.
If people are already disposed to like him, Sunak basks in their approval, and does so with a pleasant air of modesty.
But if people are downcast, he doesn’t know what to do about it, and feels irritated that here he is, sorting out many problems which proved beyond Truss and Johnson, yet getting no credit for it.
In these circumstances, he does not like going to the Commons, and if he can, evades that duty, for what is the point of exposing himself to cheap abuse?
There are actually at least three reasons why he should go as frequently as he can to the Commons.
The first is that it is his duty to do all he can to raise the morale of his MPs, by explaining to them and to the wider nation that we shall get through our present difficulties, and will enter thanks to our efforts into a period of success.
The second is that it is his own MPs who can sack him, so he ought as a matter of self-preservation to remain as aware as he can of their worries, and be thinking constantly how he can alleviate those worries.
The third is that is it is the function of any Prime Minister to take the blame when things go wrong, and it is nobler to take the blame in person than to hide away in Downing Street surrounded by advisers and spreadsheets.
All Prime Ministers at length take the blame. Truss, Johnson, May, Cameron, Brown, Blair, Major, Thatcher, Callaghan, Wilson, Heath, Home, Macmillan, Eden and Attlee all ended up taking the blame.
When I asked Jacob Rees-Mogg who was the last “great parliamentarian” to serve as Prime Minister, he suggested Churchill, who for the first 21 months of his wartime administration was not only PM and Minister of Defence, but Leader of the House of Commons.
It was the custom since Walpole for Prime Ministers who sat in the Commons to serve also as Leader of the House, but no premier since Churchill has done so, and there has been an unhealthy tendency for them to shut themselves away in Downing Street, isolated from the concerns of their own backbenchers.
Yet the Commons, properly used, still offers unparalleled opportunities to tell the nation, as well as your party, what you are actually trying to do.
It compels the painful attempt at explanation: a task to which Sunak, preoccupied by pressing practical difficulties, is not devoting enough time or effort.
Incidentally, in order to give a great speech in the Commons, it is not necessary to be a great speaker.
The most devastating speech I ever heard there was delivered by Geoffrey Howe on 13th November 1990. In it he explained why he had resigned from Margaret Thatcher’s Government.
This was assassination by explanation, the effect of his words heightened by Howe’s refusal to give interviews. All that he wished to say was contained within his carefully written speech.
If Sunak has any sense of self-preservation, he will come to the Commons as often as he possibly can, in order to explain himself.