Sunak’s strategy may struggle to survive contact with reality
Image credit: Flickr/No10
At the Conservative Party Conference this week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak presented himself as the change candidate. Chris Wilkins, Audley CEO and former Head of Strategy at No10, argues that this strategy is more rhetoric than reality.
Rishi Sunak arrived in Manchester this week hoping to position himself as the ‘change candidate’ – the man who would make the tough, long-term decisions to overturn a political consensus that has prevailed in British politics for far too long.
It’s almost word for word the same strategy adopted by Theresa May in her first conference speech as leader in 2016. But where May had the dislocating wrench of Brexit for context, Sunak – a man who’s already been prime minister for a year – may find it harder to grasp the mantle of change.
However, the problems with his new strategy run deeper than the context. The real challenge is its authenticity. The man who came in to steady the ship after the chaos of Trussism just doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’s really going to deliver radical, lasting change.
Towards the end of his conference address, he promised “we will be bold. We will be radical. We will… make long-term decisions so that we can build a brighter future”. The problem is there was, and is, very little to suggest there is any substance to this claim.
In particular the speech, which had been talked up in advance by Sunak’s aides, contained little in the way of tough choices or long-term policies to address the challenges voters actually care about.
On the face of it, travelling to Manchester to cancel the HS2 rail link between London and the north of England might be considered bold, but the timing and venue was forced upon him. The real problem is that it is the opposite of long-term thinking. The money saved will be channelled in to a series of smaller initiatives designed to deliver results more quickly, but without the kind of impact on the country’s productivity that lay at the heart of the case for the HS2 scheme. Nor is it the courageous decision the prime minister seeks to portray. In fact, while contentious with some, it’s guaranteed to garner positive reviews from the Tory leaning media. You could argue the courageous, future-focused decision was actually the opposite of the one the prime minister made.
The same is true of the recent announcements on net zero. The prime minister has spent the past week citing his decision to slow the pace of progress on net zero as an example of the kind of difficult decision he’s prepared to take even when it means making himself unpopular. Yet the opposite is true: it was a decision sure to be cheered by the likes of the Telegraph, Sun and Mail. And given the government’s own climate change committee says the UK was unlikely to meet its net zero targets even under the old regime, Sunak’s decision to go slower is clearly one with the short, rather than long, term in mind.
The other announcements in Sunak’s conference address were a strange hotchpotch of initiatives that bear little relation to the priorities of most people. He promised a new set of qualifications in place of A-levels and a strategy to phase out smoking, but these are hardly top of the public’s mind. Rather, they seem to be personal missions for the prime minister: laudable perhaps, but far from the game-changing, radical announcements that allow him to position himself as the candidate of change.
For this new strategy to work, the prime minister must be prepared to get to grips with the issues that have held the country back for too long. Yet there is no indication any such commitment is on the way.
A change candidate would address perhaps the number one issue at the heart of so many of the UK’s challenges: planning. Yet the prime minister has already backed away from the kind of planning reforms that would make it easier for people to get on the housing ladder.
A change candidate, committed to bold and radical policies, would set out a plan to deal with social care. But a careful briefing given to the Sunday Times’s political journalist Tim Shipman last week made clear that no such plan is on the way.
A change candidate would be honest about the future of the pensions triple-lock – a policy the country can no longer afford and which exacerbates the gap in fairness between the generations. But again, Shipman was assured it remains untouchable. Bold, long-term thinking will take a backseat. The triple-lock will stay.
Without a much bolder policy programme, the gap between rhetoric and reality will hole this strategy below the waterline. And this speaks to the real problem. Rishi Sunak is not by nature one of life’s radicals. He’s a pragmatic technocrat – far more comfortable with continuity than change.
May, an instinctively more radical figure, saw her premiership fall apart when the change strategy was ditched in favour of one that favoured continuity. Now Sunak, a more traditional Conservative prime minister, is ditching continuity in favour of change.
It’s a bold strategic move but one that may struggle to survive contact with reality. Brand matters in politics and a change candidate needs to be prepared to be radical. ‘Long-term decisions for a brighter future’ may test well in focus groups, but if you’re not going to do anything to turn it into reality, there’s a good chance people will see through it and it’s just going to feel like more of the same.
By Chris Wilkins, CEO of Audley.