This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Rishi Sunak has insisted the Tory party is united despite rumours about a plot to replace him as Prime Minister before the general election. Failure to turn around the party’s dire polling numbers has fuelled speculation about him being shunted for Commons leader Penny Mordaunt in a bid to avoid a general election disaster. Westminster tittle-tattle, Sunak says, but as our friends down the road in Buckingham Palace know, there is rarely smoke without fire.
Is this 1997 again? We don’t believe so. While John Major’s government back then was exhausted and unpopular, Ministers still broadly retained a sense of public service and had the national interest in mind as opposed to trashing the place on the way out. Austerity, Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have all put paid to that. As Professor Tim Bale noted in The Observer this weekend, “I don’t recall Major’s fag-end administration being quite so poisonous and pointless, or quite so loathed, as Sunak’s”.
Regardless, the PM is pressing on, telling voters that there are better times ahead for the country and, he hopes, himself too after a rough few years. But he shouldn’t bank on it. The big problem he faces now is not that he or his party are deeply unpopular, it’s that they are looking for an escape route in all the wrong places. A few years ago I sat down with a PR firm that had developed an AR headset for this sort of thing that would visualise social sentiment to help with crisis management. It came in handy when one of their clients – a payday loan company – was on the receiving end of a bit of damaging press published in the Guardian. Their response was to do nothing. The augmented map showed that few (if any) of their clients read that newspaper and even fewer were aware of the controversy or talking about it. Responding would only serve to bring it to their attention.
For Sunak, his headset is currently tilted towards an area of the electorate that is both dwindling and saturated. Time was that the right wing proved fertile ground for the Conservatives. Not any more. Reform UK, which was kept at bay in 2019 with underhanded Brexit deals, looks to be eating into the Tories’ share of the vote with a vengeance. Lee Anderson, who recently became the party’s first MP, is now tipped to win in Ashfield under his new banner after previously being headed for an all-but-certain defeat. I can believe that. And I can also see the Tory vote becoming almost non-existent in that constituency and elsewhere across the so-called Red Wall too.
And if that wasn’t scary enough for Sunak, the prospect of Nigel Farage returning to the fore and more defections should keep him awake at night. As his former deputy chairman rightly pointed out, a vote for Reform UK is a vote for Labour. Especially when your entire war machine is pointed at appeasing the people who are jumping ship with the most haste.
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