Can the AUKUS deal save Britain’s PM?

Yet even so, Sunak seems, cat-like, to be consistently landing on his feet. He is very close to nailing down the most intractable unfinished business of Brexit: delivering a solution to the Northern Ireland conundrum, which is trapped in a sectarian quagmire.

The Brexit ultras in his party have been largely quieted, and even Boris Johnson seems unable to rally a rebellion.

Rishi Sunak during the AUKUS announcement. 

He has produced a plan to stop the stubbornly persistent illegal migration across the Channel that might involve stepping back from the European Convention on Human Rights.

Such thumbing of the nose at international law is usually a red rag to more liberal Tories; but the bill passed its first House of Commons test with barely a rustle of rage. The plan also requires a repaired relationship with Emmanuel Macron – the Frenchman Britons love to hate, and vice versa – and Sunak has delivered that, too.

This week, Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt had to deliver a budget that was fiscally prudent but that gave no succour to former PM Liz Truss’s incipient Thatcherite splinter cell.

Hunt stuck to the plan to raise the company tax rate – kryptonite to Truss’s tribe of Tories – and admitted that the total tax take in coming years will hit a postwar record of almost 38 per cent.

Yet he and Sunak seem to have kept any Trussite truculence relatively subdued, by adopting other measures she has championed: expanding childcare subsidies, creating enterprise zones, and doling out tax breaks for investment.

Hunt was also able to tell the British public that his independent Office for Budget Responsibility no longer expects the economy to shrivel 1.4 per cent this year. Instead, it might even dodge a technical recession (two consecutive quarters of contraction) altogether.

Sure, the economy will still be 0.2 per cent smaller at the end of 2023 than it is now, and will be the worst performer in the G7 group of rich countries; but when expectations were so low, it somehow still feels like a win.

Starting from a low base

Britain’s generally basement-level expectations of its politics, economy and society right now are actually working in Sunak’s favour.

A passenger at Euston station in London looks at the departures board during a rail strike last month. AP

Train strikes are so commonplace that, although they remain incredibly inconvenient, they are now baked into everyday life. The crisis in the health system is so bad that there’s almost a “Blitz spirit” developing around Britons’ approach to medical treatment and care. Energy prices have been so high that, even now when they are still extortionate, it feels like an improvement.

It would be hard to imagine things being much worse in what is supposed to be one of the world’s richest and most entrepreneurial countries. So Sunak doesn’t have to twitch much muscle to clear this low bar.

If he can make things just that bit better, he might do enough to save his Conservative Party from what right now looks set to be an epochally crushing defeat at the election due by the end of next year.

If he can make things quite a bit better, he might even be able to start pulling the reins on Opposition Leader Keir Starmer’s unbridled canter into Downing Street.

At the moment, Sunak’s cause still looks lost. In a YouGov poll released on March 15, Labour’s share of the vote is 45 per cent to the Tories’ 23 per cent. The only positive for the government is that this chasm is one of the narrowest gaps in the past six months.

Asked who would make the better prime minister, Starmer leads with 30 points to Sunak’s 24. A Deltapoll released the same day posted similar results, but with even worse news for Sunak. Asked which party would manage the economy better, Labour scored 46 per cent to the Conservatives’ 34 per cent. The strongest Tory bastion has fallen.

Silver lining

Paradoxically, if the world is engulfed in a banking crisis, this could help Sunak. A confident response would offer a platform to re-establish his party’s economic credibility, and make people more fearful of change.

It also gives the PM and party something else to blame. The good news for the Conservatives in the Deltapoll is that this is already happening: people attribute their economic woes mostly to the war in Ukraine, the COVID pandemic and energy companies, ahead of sheeting it home to the government.

And the even better news for Sunak is that his Deltapoll ratings for competence and trustworthiness are not miles behind Starmer, and are streets ahead of both Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party more generally.

Sunak has established a baseline of popularity, and is now trying to build an edifice of achievement to go with it. It may not be an election battering ram, but it could at the very least be a sturdy set of sandbags.

The problem, though, is that many of his MPs – and the Conservative Party more generally – might not see things like this. They still see Sunak, rather than themselves, as the problem.

To the malcontents, Sunak is an illegitimate ruler who knifed Johnson and toppled Truss. They see a tax-raising, Brexit-undermining social liberal, and hunger for the ideologically pure flavour of conservative red meat.

A successful PM needs a party united behind him or her. If the party does not support Sunak, it will be very difficult for him to deliver, and to win.

But a successful PM needs to listen to the electorate, and his MPs have gone a bit deaf. If Sunak does what the party wants, it will also be very difficult for him to deliver, and to win.

The more successes, like AUKUS, with which Sunak can pad out his prime ministerial CV, the more chance he will have of keeping his internal opponents muzzled and muted.

Then all he has to do is convince the voting public, which is at the moment heartily sick of the 13-year-old Conservative government.

Sunak’s parents were pharmacists; but it’s an open question whether he, too, can produce a prescription to solve the Tories’ lingering ailment.