April 07, 2024
Rumours about Sunak’s next job is more self-indulgence Tory voters won’t stand for
In the late 50s, the historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson gave the world the term “bike-shedding”, also known as Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. This posits that people and organisations spend a disproportionate amount of time focusing on trivial but easy-to-grasp issues over large, complex, and difficult ones – in his example, the designers of a nuclear power plant endlessly debating how best to build the staff bicycle shed. Northcote Parkinson is now some decades dead. But anyone looking to publish an updated edition of his famous Parkinson’s Laws could surely ask for no more vivid or high-profile example of this one than Rishi Sunak’s ailing government . The absence of big-picture thinking was initially understandable; the Prime Minister was taking over from the catastrophic mayfly regime of Liz Truss , and a week-by-week focus on steadying the ship was really his only option. Yet the country was never going to return the Conservative Party for a fifth term in government just because it deposed Truss. After a year on the job, Sunak needed to give the voters – not to mention his own activists – a bit of vision; to show that he understood the seriousness of the challenges facing the party and the nation. Unfortunately, last year’s Tory conference in Manchester proved once and for all that whatever his talents as an administrator, Sunak simply did not have it in him to provide the sort of leadership his country and his party needed. Instead of setting out a coherent diagnosis of what ails Britain, let alone any prescriptions, the Prime Minister focused on three fiddling interventions: reforming A-levels, introducing a new smoking ban , and scrapping High Speed 2 . Read Next Rishi Sunak’s attacks on 'foreign' courts are a gift to Nigel Farage You might support the objectives of any or all of these, or you might not. But on their best day, they have absolutely nothing to do with the increasingly fraught state of the public finances, with stagnant wages, with the housing crisis , with the challenges of an ageing population, or any of the other top-level dangers that keep British policymakers up at night. Worse still, and irrespective of whether you support their goals or not, they were amateurish policies, cooked up in the Downing Street bunker without consultation across government. Thus, Sunak announced the abolition of T-levels (a major Tory accomplishment to bolster technical education) during T-levels Week, without having told the poor minister doing the media round for that. Thus, HS2 was scrapped so that the money could be ploughed into “Network North”, a non-entity which the Prime Minister originally promised would deliver a tram link to Manchester airport (which opened in 2014) and has since had its branding plastered over fixing potholes in London. Thus, Sunak took the most eye-catching element of New Zealand’s (now-abandoned) anti-smoking policy but none of the politically difficult elements, such as banning the independent retail of tobacco, needed to actually make it work. It will fall to a future minister to decide whether to abandon it or force thousands of small shops to shut. It wouldn’t be fair to completely single out the Prime Minister here. The sad truth is that no senior politician on either side seems ready to square up honestly to the scale of the challenge. That’s why Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves are fighting it out over a tiny sliver of economic territory: each knows that the public finances are on a tightrope, and to shift dramatically in any direction risks a fatal fall. But the buck stops in No 10, and the make-a-wish character of Sunak’s government – more funding for cricket! More regulation for Artificial Intelligence! – looks to many Tories like self-indulgence the party cannot afford. That, more than the rumours about this or that Job awaiting him after the election, will be what is driving much of the anger among grassroots Conservatives. A reasonable person can appreciate that Sunak will have a life after politics. Besides which, his detractors certainly wouldn’t want him to try to cling on as leader after the election. A graceful exit would suit all parties. But wasting time and energy on trivial personal priorities, via rushed and badly designed policies, in the face of what could be an existentially dangerous election for the Tories? That’s another matter entirely. Henry Hill is the deputy editor of ConservativeHome, a political blog that is independent of the Conservative Party
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