Rishi Sunak’s missed opportunity to tell a good story

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Good morning from the FT’s Africa Summit. Last year, the only question people had for me was “what on earth is going on in your country?” as the UK reeled from the fallout from Liz Truss’s “mini” Budget.

This year, I’ve heard a speech from Andrew Mitchell, the government’s international development minister and by any definition one of the most respected politicians on this topic at Westminster. This is the change that Rishi Sunak has wrought.

Yet Sunak’s own personal rating is as bad as that of Boris Johnson’s at the time of his fall, while the Conservative party’s poll ratings are exactly where they were when Sunak took over from Liz Truss. Some thoughts on why and what this means below.

Recovery story

History teaches us that it takes a disastrous event of one kind or another for a party to lose its reputation for economic competence and takes a huge amount of work to reclaim it. Harold Wilson’s devaluation of sterling in 1967 haunted Labour until Tony Blair became leader, while it took the global financial crisis to repair the damage the Conservative party suffered from the UK’s exit from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992.

If you look at the polling, that is the biggest thing Liz Truss did: although the Conservative party was already trailing the Labour party in overall voting intention, Truss’s budget destroyed the Tory party’s economic credibility. It was as cataclysmic and catastrophic an event in the life of the Conservative party as the global financial crisis was in that of New Labour.

Rishi Sunak has a good story to tell here. His first Autumn Statement as Truss’s successor reversed the measures of the “mini” Budget and restored the Office for Budget Responsibility’s role as the official forecaster for fiscal events. Without the credibility that he and Jeremy Hunt had won over the course of not just days but years, the crisis that the Truss episode plunged the UK into could have been inescapable.

But following the global financial crisis Gordon Brown had a good story to tell, too: without the actions he and other governments took, the aftermath could have been worse. Of course, neither Brown’s nor Sunak’s problems were solely about the financial crisis. The cost of living crisis, and the pressures on the public realm are problems that can’t be spun or wished away. That the government is having to soften sentencing guidelines in England because the UK doesn’t have enough prison places is not something that voters would have shrugged off if it weren’t for Truss.

But one reason why I think Sunak is on course for a bigger and more devastating defeat than Brown in the 2010 election is that the latter did, at least, have a story to tell about his role in ameliorating the financial crisis. Sunak has no real public message to speak of as far as the Truss experiment is concerned and instead prefers to speak about cars and gender issues. That is a serious strategic blunder for the Conservatives — and one they will have cause to regret at the next election.

Now try this

I mostly listened to Randall Goosby’s Roots while writing my column. The album filled the core of the violinist’s performance at the Southbank on Friday. I’ve added that, and the original (and best) Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the Doctor Who theme to the Inside Politics playlist, for reasons I think will be obvious to anyone who reads my column this week.

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