Voices: Chris Pincher faces suspension – and Sunak is left to clean up more of Boris Johnson’s toxic legacy

“Pincher by name, pincher by nature,” quipped Boris Johnson when he ignored warnings and appointed a known sex pest, Chris Pincher, to be deputy government chief whip.

It was Johnson’s denialism about the man and the decision he took to appoint and then retain him in his government that was the actual immediate reason, rather than Partygate or allegations of corruption, that led to Johnson’s downfall last year. Now, Pincher – and Johnson’s patronage and defence of him – is contributing to what feels like the inexorable decline and fall of the Sunak administration.

The irony is that the Pincher scandal and the lies that followed were the final straw, the thing that finally prompted Rishi Sunak (and Sajid Javid and others) to say “enough is enough” and quit Johnson’s government. Sunak took a stand and did the right thing: much good it is doing him now, though. In a matter of weeks, Pincher’s disgrace may lead to yet another by-election, this time in Tamworth, an ultra-safe seat.

If Labour manages to overturn Pincher’s massive majority of 30,542 then the full scale of the cataclysm awaiting them next year becomes terrifyingly clear. Sunak is intelligent enough to see it. If he hasn’t given up yet, as Keir Starmer taunts him, he jolly well should have. The path to Tory recovery is vanishingly narrow.

So, Sunak is faced with clearing up some more of Johnson’s toxic legacy. You may have noticed the other day that the UN is going to allow the Japanese authorities to get rid of the radioactive water still at the Fukushima plant over a forty-year period, and cleansing the Tory part of the mess left behind by Johnson feels like it’s going to take just as long. And that may be the point, because Sunak obviously doesn’t have decades to rebuild the trust and confidence in his party that was so comprehensively trashed during the deranged premierships of Johnson and, lest we forget, Liz Truss, whose rapid unplanned disassembly of the gilts market did such enduring harm. And he knows it.

If you think about it, it must be excruciatingly painful for a man as smart, logical and rational for Sunak to try and get through this. It’s a kind of political “locked in” syndrome, where you are conscious but powerless. He seems to have a decent analytical mind, and he must know he’s doomed. If, as I’m sure he has, he just sort of stepped outside his body for a moment and looked around him, and assessed with cool objectivity the place he is in and the destination he needs to get to, he would draw the sensible conclusion that he’s doomed and the best he can manage is some damage limitation at the margins.

What kind of torture is that for someone so used to success and now so clearly faced with failure, and at such a high-profile level?

As has been obvious for some time, he is rated more highly than his party (albeit Sunak’s personal scores have been slipping lately), and that is another problem. He can’t actually do anything about the clowns that surround him that are making his life so difficult. He can’t even ditch the likes of Suella Braverman for fear of the right punishing him with a humiliating parliamentary rebellion, while backbenchers such as Lee “30p” Anderson, inexplicably promoted to be deputy chair of the party, appear on television with a can of Whiskas to promote the human consumption of cat food.

To mix the metaphor, Sunak may not be a lion, but he is leading some awful underperforming donkeys. He’s got an MBA from Stanford; he can well comprehend his current predicament – and, frustratingly, his lack of options.

Sunak might also reflect on the mistakes he’s made, and most of all his “five priorities”. With the exception of “stop the boats”, which was uncharacteristically reckless, when he announced them in January they all looked, frankly, easy-peasy, and require little effort or luck. Inflation was supposedly bound to tumble down rapidly, just as a matter of arithmetic (because oil and food prices probably can’t double again inside a year), and the other very minimal economic goals likewise.

Not so much, now. Interest rates are having to rise far beyond expectations, as inflation proves sticky. A recession seems likely in election year. NHS waiting lists were also going to subside as the staff worked through the post-pandemic, but that seems to be going wrong as well. And the less said about migration and small boats the better.

Setting those goals in that way, with hindsight, was an unforced error, leaving him at the mercy of events, as he must surely realise. He can’t now ditch the five priorities – because, as he keeps telling us, they’re the people’s priorities, so the only option is just to soldier on with them and hope for the best. Such is the scale of the tax hikes that Jeremy Hunt has imposed, there probably will be some room for token tax cuts next spring and, well, maybe some of the targets might show signs of progress as 2024 goes on. Maybe Labour will disappoint in the by-elections that are coming up, including the one in Tamworth if it happens.

It is just possible that the rumoured Tory campaign to portray Sunak as the energetic, sharp-witted young Kennedy-like figure facing the dull, vague, older Bidenesque Starmer will suddenly persuade people to think again about a Labour government. Greg Hands, Conservative chair, might convince the people that while the Tories are bad, Labour would be even worse, using that joke note a Labour minister wrote 13 years ago.

Sunak might even push his luck towards the full term, and take his chances on a winter election in 2024, in the hope that something will turn up. He knows that it won’t, though, because it’s silly. Sunak is far too clever to be Mr Micawber, which makes it all the more difficult for him to pretend he hasn’t given up.