Tories willing to cut Rishi Sunak some slack but same tough choices remain

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More than 150 Conservative MPs have come to view Rishi Sunak as their saviour from the threatened return of a scandal-mired Boris Johnson. But when Sunak was at his lowest point this year, after revelations about his family’s tax affairs, some of his closest supporters were unsure whether he really wanted to be prime minister – or was even that committed to his then job as chancellor.

The scrutiny on the family took its toll and they moved out of Downing Street for some breathing space. Some aides wondered at the time whether Sunak would give up his seat at the next election for a return to his old life in California.

Within months, Sunak had shown he did have some determination to do the job by resigning from the Treasury, hastening Johnson’s demise and then running in the subsequent leadership contest. But his campaign was strangely lacking in political savvy, allowing itself to be outmanoeuvred by Liz Truss by failing to understand the concerns and obsessions of Tory members.

Fast-forward just a few months and Sunak finds himself now cast in the role of Tory messiah by some of his colleagues. He is seen as the economic fixer who implemented the furlough scheme during Covid and predicted the disastrous market reaction to Truss’s unfunded tax cuts. They are now looking to him to do the near impossible – turn around the party’s low poll ratings and win an election against Keir Starmer in two years’ time.

But if he finds himself as prime minister, possibly as soon as Monday, Sunak will have to find depths of political creativity and diplomacy to deal with a nightmare in-tray. He has been an MP for just seven years, and was a cabinet minister for only two, and even colleagues who back him for the premiership acknowledge he has no breadth of experience across departments to prepare him for the multiple crises piling up on all fronts.

From the NHS still struggling with Covid, to the economic situation, to the prospect of energy blackouts and a threatened winter of discontent with strikes, the UK is facing a phenomenally difficult six months.

The Conservatives are deeply divided in parliament. A broad spectrum of MPs have come out for Sunak, from Suella Braverman and Steve Baker on the right to Bob Neill and Stephen Hammond from the centrist wing, and he will have made many promises in order to extract such support, from Eurosceptics in particular.

Many of the choices that Truss faced still remain. Does he go for growth on the back of higher immigration, or stick to post-Brexit promises of tougher curbs? Can he keep to Johnson’s 2019 promises of no return to austerity or will he argue that the current market conditions mean cuts are essential?

Does he ask the public to try to cut back their energy use to avoid winter blackouts? Will he take a conciliatory position towards striking public sector workers or try to turn it into a culture war issue with Labour? No one knows, because he has done no media interviews about his second attempt to become prime minister since Truss resigned on Thursday.

At the same time, some MPs – even among his backers – acknowledge that Sunak can come across as out of touch with the public, with his penchant for luxury goods, and his memorable failure to understand how to use a contactless payment card in a petrol station. At a time of huge struggle for households, he is the richest member of parliament.

If he wins, his inheritance from Truss and Johnson will be dire, so Tory MPs are likely to cut him a degree of slack. But as a member of the government that contributed to many of the problems the UK is facing, Sunak would have only a very narrow window of opportunity with the public to turn things around – and many potentially very unpopular decisions to make.