Stick, twist or self-destruct: how Sunak can still win the next election
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When MPs return to Parliament on Monday, Conservative members will have two questions for their leader Rishi Sunak: when is he going to call a general election, and does he have any idea how he might win it?
Mr Sunak has said his “working assumption” is that he will go to the country in the second half of the year, and although he could, in theory, delay polling day until January 28, 2025, a November ballot seems the most likely.
Deciding on a date is the easy part. Working out how to overturn Labour’s 18-point lead in the opinion polls is an altogether more chewy conundrum.
Two Tory tribes
Some Tory MPs have already given up hope of remaining in power and, with naked self-preservation in mind, want the Prime Minister to play it safe, keep core supporters happy, and staunch the flow of votes to Labour.
That way, they believe, they will lose but retain enough seats to rebuild and potentially regain power in five years’ time. Some are referring to this as the Blue Wall strategy.
Others want Mr Sunak to pursue a bolder agenda, striking out for victory with populist policies on tax and immigration.
This is the Red Wall strategy, as it is designed to appeal to the voters who made up Labour’s Red Wall of safe seats before Boris Johnson tempted them away with his Get Brexit Done offer in 2019.
The danger with the Red Wall strategy is that the more Mr Sunak tries to please working-class voters with, say, big state spending, the more he might lose the support of the Tory base, who might decide to stay at home or even vote elsewhere – for the Reform Party, or the Liberal Democrats – if they feel ignored.
Both Red and Blue Wall alternatives assume that Mr Sunak will be the one in Number 10 when the election is called but, even at this late stage, there are those in his Party plotting to remove him before then, possibly as early as next month.
It would be fair to refer to this as the self-destruct strategy, as its main aim seems to be blowing up Mr Sunak’s premiership, and with it any lingering chance of victory, for purely ideological reasons.
The Cummings camp
Assuming he can dodge that plot, the principal problem for Mr Sunak in trying to unite his party behind a single strategy is that he must first unite his Number 10 team, whose instincts also divide them into two camps.
One of those tribes, led by Liam Booth-Smith, Mr Sunak’s chief of staff and former Treasury aide, believes Mr Sunak would benefit from the input of proven campaign mastermind Dominic Cummings.
The news that Mr Sunak has twice held meetings with Mr Cummings, surely the most divisive figure in Conservative politics in recent years, adds a delicious dash of intrigue to the long election build-up.
Mr Cummings, who has a more instinctive grasp of what voters are really thinking than anyone trapped in the Westminster bubble, offered to build “a political machine to destroy Labour and win the election”. Given his track record in the Vote Leave campaign and as Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, only a fool would dismiss this as mere bluster.
Mr Booth-Smith clearly took him seriously, as Mr Cummings left little doubt that he was the one who set up the meetings, suggesting he wanted the Prime Minister to be open to more radical ideas.
This is not a huge surprise to those who know the Prime Minister’s closest advisers. They have been aware that Mr Booth-Smith has remained in contact with Mr Cummings since he was forced out of Number 10 in 2020. Nerissa Chesterfield, the current Downing Street director of communications, worked for Mr Cummings at Vote Leave during the EU referendum campaign.
Mr Cummings disclosed in his blog that he had advised Mr Sunak to move Conservative Campaign Headquarters to the north, and change the party so radically that “it is essentially a new entity”.
He added that: “Liam Booth-Smith knew what the problems are and what to do,” but the Prime Minister “chose not to listen to Booth-Smith” and instead bounced between what Mr Cummings describes as Establishment conventional wisdom and ERG [the European Research Group of hardline Tory Brexiteers] rhetoric, both of which he insists are doomed to fail.
The meetings between Mr Sunak and Mr Cummings in December 2022 and July last year came to nothing. Mr Cummings says the Prime Minister wanted him to “secretly” work for No 10, but Mr Cummings was only interested in a job if he got to pursue his long-term goals of reforming Whitehall, defence procurement and nuclear weapons infrastructure.
Nevertheless, his admirers remain at Mr Sunak’s side, whispering in his ear.
Steady Levido
The other camp in Downing Street is led by Isaac Levido, the Australian political consultant who successfully steered the Tories through the 2019 general election campaign, having worked with his former boss Sir Lynton Crosby on the 2015 and 2017 campaigns.
Mr Levido, who officially began a full-time job at CCHQ at the start of this month but has been advising Mr Sunak throughout his premiership, believes Mr Sunak should hold his nerve, that he needs to show he has delivered on his pledges on the economy, NHS waiting lists and small boats before setting out any sort of future vision, and that the polls will narrow as the cost of living crisis eases.
His views largely align with those of James Forsyth, the Prime Minister’s best friend, former classmate and now political secretary, whose wife Allegra Stratton – previously Boris Johnson’s press secretary – worked with Mr Johnson’s wife Carrie to force Mr Cummings out of Downing Street.
With impeccable timing for Mr Levido as he starts his new role, there is finally some good news on the cost of living, with Halifax and some other lenders cutting mortgage rates by close to one per cent and predictions that they will come down further over the course of this year and into 2025.
Goldman Sachs has predicted that the Bank of England will start cutting interest rates in May, while inflation, which stood at more than 11 per cent in October 2022, was down to 3.9 per cent in November. Petrol, which hit £1.91 per litre in July 2022, is now down to around £1.36 at many forecourts.
You might need to be a driver or a variable rate mortgage holder to be any better off in real terms, but the feelgood factor is everything when it comes to the economics of elections, and if voters believe that the cost of living is coming down, there is a chance that Rishi Sunak will be given credit for it. Maybe they already have.
The polling firm YouGov carries out a weekly poll of Britain’s mood, which shows that this week 56 per cent of adults describe themselves as happy, the highest percentage since before the pandemic. Just 35 per cent class themselves as sad, which is the lowest number since pre-pandemic times. Even if the Christmas break has played its part in lifting people’s mood, more people are happy and fewer are sad than at this time in any other year YouGov has monitored.
One Tory source who has seen the results of recent focus groups with undecided voters – who make up around 15 per cent of the electorate – said: “If the economy is improving and there is some movement on small boats the Conservatives can get back a lot of those voters who have said they will switch to Labour.
“Everything we have seen suggests that Labour’s support is shallow, because voters still don’t think Sir Keir Starmer is any good. A lot of voters are risk averse, and if they think the economy is improving and they give Sunak credit for that, they might think twice before voting for a change of government.”
Mr Levido believes the Tories will do better than expected, and he has reportedly pencilled in Nov 14 as election day in the expectation that the economy will look even healthier by then and that progress will have been made on the Rwanda policy and on NHS waiting lists.
The Rwanda risk
Sending illegal migrants on a one-way flight to Rwanda to claim asylum there instead of the UK is Mr Sunak’s biggest opportunity to show Red Wall voters he is serious about cutting immigration and making good on one of the promises of Brexit. But the policy could also be his downfall.
A group of Tory MPs from the far right of the party have formed a plan to use a coming Parliamentary vote on Rwanda to oust Mr Sunak.
The plot, fomented by followers of former home secretary Suella Braverman, is as follows: when Mr Sunak’s Rwanda Bill – formally the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill – gets to its committee stage later this month, they will introduce amendments, including the removal of a clause which allows migrants to use British courts to bring appeals against being sent to Rwanda.
If Mr Sunak refuses to accept their amendments, they could try to vote down the Bill at its third reading, or trigger a confidence vote in the Prime Minister through the now familiar mechanism of no confidence letters to the chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs (53 letters would be needed).
In the minds of the rebels, Mr Sunak will lose a confidence vote and will be replaced with a right wing leader, most probably Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, who will call an immediate death-or-glory election which she will either win, or lose by a small enough margin that victory will be guaranteed next time around.
The flaws in this plan are obvious, not least the fact that even some of Mr Sunak’s biggest critics in the party regard the idea of a fourth change of prime minister in five years as madness.
“The rebels just don’t have the numbers,” said one Conservative source. “They always talk tough about defeating the Government, like they did in December in the second reading of the Rwanda Bill, but when push comes to shove it always fizzles out.”
Assuming Mr Sunak survives any attempted winter coup, we will know whether he is pursuing a Blue Wall or a Red Wall strategy once Jeremy Hunt has delivered his budget on March 6.
Budget signpost
If Mr Hunt decides to cut or scrap inheritance tax or increases the threshold at which the 40p tax rate kicks in (currently £50,271) he will be targeting Blue Wall votes. If he decides to target the Red Wall, we can expect to see a cut in the basic rate of income tax from 20p to 19p or even 18p, or a cut in fuel duty, both of which are vastly more popular with the electorate than IHT cuts.
Mr Sunak’s hero is the late Nigel Lawson, who aimed to abolish at least one tax every year, so a radical tax-cutting budget that offered red meat to Tory voters would be entirely in keeping with Mr Sunak’s instincts. Downing Street sources talk about “good news for people on the personal tax side” if Mr Hunt has sufficient headroom to make meaningful cuts.
The temptation, then, would be to call an early election, thus capitalising on the feelgood factor of a tax-cutting budget and getting ahead of May’s local elections, which are likely to go well for Labour.
A “working assumption” of an election later in the year is not a firm commitment, and conspiracy theorists will posit that it is a deliberate bluff to catch Labour out.
But will a Prime Minister currently ranked at 10-1 against returning to power by some bookies really risk cutting short his premiership by six months? It would be a huge gamble, and there are many reasons to sit tight for now.
Waiting until the autumn means that voters will have had a chance to feel the result of the Budget in their pockets before going to the polls, on top of any further reductions in the cost of living.
It also gives Mr Sunak an outside chance of getting Rwanda flights off the ground before an election (which he would not be able to do by May) and it maximises his chances of benefiting from an unexpected boost, such as good news from Ukraine.
After all, the Falklands War transformed Margaret Thatcher’s fortunes, but no-one saw it coming. A November election would have the added benefit of enabling Mr Sunak to use a Tory conference to rally the troops, sell his vision and attempt to unite the various factions (One Nation Tories, New Conservatives, European Research Group, Northern Research Group, Common Sense Group, Conservative Growth Group, Conservative Democratic Organisation, China Research Group, Net Zero Scrutiny Group) that currently make the Party more of a turbulent coalition than a cohesive whole.
A route to victory?
Those who think Mr Sunak has no hope of success have short memories. It is true that opinion polls have consistently given Labour a double-digit lead that shows no sign of waning, but opinion polls were spectacularly wrong on the EU referendum and Donald Trump’s election, both in 2016; David Cameron’s 2015 success and Theresa May’s terrible result in 2017.
Labour had a 30-point lead in the polls in 1996, which translated into a 13 per cent margin of victory the following year, and in 2021 Olaf Scholz’s SPD party trailed a distant third in polls of German voters a few months before the country’s general election, only for Angela Merkel’s CDU to blow a 24-point lead when the ballot boxes were opened.
We have no idea what will be in Mr Sunak’s manifesto, but his determination to ban smoking, abolish A-levels and scrap the northern leg of HS2 show that he is not afraid of bold policies.
Nor is he facing an invincible opponent in Sir Keir Starmer.
Voters remain unimpressed by him and Tory HQ has been told that the Crown Prosecution Service’s failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile when the Labour leader was Director of Public Prosecutions is brought up surprisingly often by voters in focus groups. There is a belief he can be got at once a campaign starts in earnest.
There is, though, one other variable that Mr Sunak cannot control, and the thought of it will be enough to make his blood run cold. Its name is Nigel Farage.
Reform UK, formerly Mr Farage’s Brexit Party, is polling around 11 per cent – enough to do the Tories serious damage and cost them multiple seats by splitting voters on the right.
When YouGov asked voters how they would vote if Mr Farage was Reform’s leader, rather than Richard Tice, the current incumbent, that number went up to 14 per cent and the Tory vote share went down by 1 per cent. And that was a poll carried out before Mr Farage’s people-pleasing stint on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!
Mr Farage remains good friends with several hardline Tory Brexiteers. He has privately told them that he will consider a return to frontline politics if it is clear that the Tories have no chance at all of winning and that the legacy of Brexit is in peril. He loves to tease journalists by telling them: “Timing is everything.”
The nightmare scenario for Number 10 is that Mr Farage returns as leader of Reform, or announces his candidacy for a Westminster seat, at some point in the early autumn.
As one Conservative source put it: “If Farage comes back two or three months out from an election the Tories will be dead.”
There are sensible voices in the Party who believe backbenchers might suffer a collective meltdown if that happens, and might decide to replace Mr Sunak through a combination of panic and frustration, believing they will have nothing to lose by that point.
Not for the first time, the Conservative Party’s biggest barrier to electoral success would appear to be the Conservative Party itself.
