Rishi Sunak's "Shine" Is Fading And Tories Are Divided On How To Revive it
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (Alamy)
6 min read
Tory MPs are now broadly united in their acceptance that Rishi Sunak will lead them into the next general election with the Boris Johnson show diminished to a passing circus.
But the Prime Minister's faltering personal brand – widely considered to be a secret weapon for the bruised party – has some Conservative MPs worried, and they remain divided on what they can do to revive it.
Sunak's allies are urging some restless Conservative MPs to join them in cheerleading the Prime Minister in order to bolster his flagging ratings if they still want a chance of winning an unlikely general election victory in 2024. One Tory minister told PoliticsHome they believed backbenchers needed to "take a breath" and get behind him.
The Prime Minister now faces the added challenge of keeping the parliamentary party together after Johnson's spectacular resignation as a Tory MP on Friday night threatened to inflame old tensions on the back benches. Regardless of whether he keeps the party in line he will now face not one but two by-elections after Johnson ally Nadine Dorries also stood down on Friday. Both seats could make easy targets for Labour and the Lib Dems.
Labour has been substantially ahead of the Conservatives in the polls for months, but Sunak's individual rating has stayed ahead of his party and generally level with opposition leader Keir Starmer. But pollsters say there are now signs that the Prime Minister's ratings are heading in a negative direction.
“Some of the [Sunak] shine has come off,” Luke Tryl, UK director at think tank More In Common, where he leads research into public opinion, told PoliticsHome earlier this week.
“We have seen that both in our quantitative and qualitative data."
Sunak took over as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative party with its reputation in a wretched state last October following Johnson's scandelous tenure, and a calamitous short stint by Liz Truss in which she crashed the economy.
His edge over the party and tight personal race with Starmer had given Tory MPs hope that he could reflect his relative popularity onto the party and give it a fighting chance of defeating Labour at the next election.
But according to leading polling expert Sir John Curtice, a Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde and Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, recent snapshots of public opinion indicate that the reverse is happening and Sunak's reputation is being damaged by the party.
"The story so far is that his party has become vaguely a little bit less unpopular than it was," he explained.
"Rishi Sunak, however, has moved a bit closer to his party and there are more signs of him being dragged down than the party being pulled up – which of course is not what the Conservatives are looking for."
In Westminster, the growing concern that Sunak is struggling to cut through with voters and rescue the brand is frustrating some Conservative MPs. They say they want to see more a more positive vision of the country from the Prime Minister which goes beyond his five pledges to halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce UK debt, bring down NHS waiting lists and stop small boats crossings.
One former-minister who backed Sunak in last year's Conservative party leadership contest described themselves as having become "disillusioned" with his leadership in recent weeks. "He has stabalised, but he's not cutting through," they told PoliticsHome. "There is a sizeable number [of Tory MPs] saying: 'What do we stand for? Where are we going?'."
There are currently no serious campaigns for another change in leadership. Even Conservative MPs who complain the most about Sunak's performance accept that he will lead the party into the next general election.
"Another leadership contest would make us look even more ridiculous than we already do," one former secretary of state said.
Until very recently there was still a divide in the parliamentary Conservative party between Sunak's supporters and those who wanted to bring back Johnson. But now that the latter group has dwindled to a small minority - albeit a loud one - new dividing lines split Tory MPs by levels of frustration with Sunak, and what they believe he should do in a bid to kick on.
Many Conservative back benchers want the Prime Minister to cut taxes sooner than planned and fear that doing so too close to the next election risks the public not feeling the benefit.
On Friday Nick Fletcher, the Conservative MP for Don Valley, told the Northern Research Group (NRG) conference in Doncaster that Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt "must get taxes down to let business flourish".
"I believe we need to reduce income tax, corporation tax, yes and business rates too," he said.
"Low taxes that allow people to spend their money on what they want, not on what Whitehall wants. That's how you build a strong national economy. That's how you build a strong northern economy. And that's how you build a strong local economy."
One ally of the Prime Minister, however, said the biggest problem is that Sunak's bid to demonstrate that he has united the Conservative party after years of acrimony and divide has been undermined by "crazies" who have publicly challenged his authority in recent weeks. They said that unlike in Labour, where the fringe MPs were now “in the basement”, the Tory party’s malcontents have used events like last month's National Conservatism conference to deviate from government policy, making Sunak's job needlessly more difficult.
According to Tryl, a belief that Sunak is struggling to control his party and the question of "is he strong enough?" are a growing theme in More In Common's regular focus groups, posing a threat to his public image going forward if he cannot get a handle of it.
"This is particularly exacerbated by the constant returns to the stage of Johnson," he said.
"You get people saying things like: ‘Why can’t he just get rid of Johnson? Why can’t he stand up to Johnson?’.
"In one focus group in Surrey, a woman said: ‘That’s the problem with little Rishi, he just can’t stand up to people on the world stage’. The sense of him not having control over events risks eroding that competence advantage that he clearly has.”
Whether Sunak is "strong" enough to stand up to Johnson will be put to the test in the coming days if his small army of ardent supporters decide to go to war with him over Johnson's decision to quit.
NRG leader John Stevenson told Friday's conference that it is "fact" in Westminster politics "that the most important personality is the leader of the party". He remained optimistic that by the time of the next general election, Sunak will be seen by the British public as a "far more appealing personality and individual" than Starmer.
Johnson's resignation, as well as that of his ally Nadine Dorries, mean Sunak faces by-elections in potentially two tricky contests. The Conservative lead in Johnson's seat is just over 5,000, while in Mid Bedfordshire the Liberal Democrats are confident of overcoming the 24,000 Tory majority.
The next test of whether Sunak can save the party will now come sooner than he might have hoped.
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