From missed pledges to ‘resignations week’ – summer was a total washout… but could Rishi still ride out the storm?
IT’S back to school in Westminster, and PM Rishi Sunak has a shiny new pair of Cabinet ministers to break in.
A major overhaul of his top team has been kicked into winter, after a soggy summer of missed pledges, rising waiting lists and grounded planes.
The fact that the roofs are literally falling in on scores of classrooms — riddled with dodgy concrete installed decades ago — is a metaphor not lost on weary Tory MPs, who fear that the game is up.
While many “events, dear boy, events” are out of the Prime Minister’s control, this is not what he had in mind when he set out his five goals for the year back in January.
By now he had hoped inflation would be plummeting rather than ticking down, with record NHS waiting lists and the asylum backlog heading south too.
But things have got worse — and it’s not immediately clear when they are going to get better, if at all.
‘Resignations week’
With the country going to the polls in the next 12 months, ministers fear the civil service will soon down tools or “go slow” on any sweeping measures that could change the political weather — such as meaningful welfare reform — as they prepare for a change of government.
As such, the uneasy truce that had held for the past ten months inside No10 has now ended, with the departure yesterday of comms chief Amber de Botton.
After a bungled “small boats week” that saw migrants moved back off the Bibby Stockholm barge and more arrival records smashed in the Channel, the joke in Whitehall is that last week was “resignations week”.
By now Sunak wanted to be on the attack, with results on his five pledges, and setting out his big policy vision for what a fifth straight Tory election win would look like for the country.
But instead he’s been forced to circle the wagons and send for reinforcements to his struggling Downing Street operation.
Long-time trusted press lieutenant Nerissa Chesterfield will step up to the biggest job in spin — just as another ultra-loyal Sunak supporter, Claire Coutinho, was bumped up to Cabinet as Energy Secretary.
Ministers are sanguine at best over whether mere tinkering will make any difference to the polls, which consistently show the public politely waiting to give the Conservatives an almighty kicking.
But despite the washout summer, Sunak’s team have no choice other than to channel Maggie Thatcher and, with a fixed grin, vow to “fight on and fight to win”.
On Thursday, Tory election chiefs will gather hundreds of field agents and local campaigners at a bulldozer factory in the Midlands to plot the opening salvos of an election campaign.
Whitehall advisers were given an advance preview last week — and starkly told that anyone who didn’t think the Government could win next year should head for the door now. But those hoping for more ammunition beyond Sunak’s five pledges are to be disappointed.
Focus will instead turn to Sir Keir Starmer, who strategists insist has not sealed the deal with a sceptical public.
While attacks on Labour will escalate dramatically over the coming months, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has warned colleagues it is not yet time for tax cuts.
Given the early noises being made around November 17’s Autumn Statement, it is shaping up to disappoint both MPs and party workers.
Hunt’s key message will be a boring “now is the time to hold firm”.
The inevitable battle over the Treasury’s endless desire to hike fuel duty looms again, alongside another tricky by-election in Nadine Dorries’ old Mid Bedfordshire seat.
Another possible contest, to replace groping Tory MP Chris Pincher in Tamworth, could also take place in the coming months.
And Home Secretary Suella Braverman is firmly on resignation watch as ambitious ministers turn their eye to the next Tory leadership election, which would follow an election drubbing.
The fate of the Government’s flagship Rwanda asylum scheme is in the hands of the Supreme Court next month.
Some in No10 now fear the Home Secretary will use the row to quit over the Government’s refusal to exit the European Convention on Human Rights which has been snarling up progress in tackling the small boats crisis.
‘Back of the sofa’
But while it’s more than school bells ringing in No10, with the flick of an expert’s pen narratives can change dramatically.
In Sunak’s first break in weeks, yesterday saw a startling admission by the UK’s official bean-counters that they had woefully underestimated the health of the country’s economy.
Now the Office for National Statistics says that by the end of 2021, GDP had bounced back to 0.6 per cent higher than before Covid hit — rather than 1.2 per cent lower. That means all the doomsaying from Labour and the BBC is blown out of the water.
It means Labour’s favoured attack line, that the UK has the worst growth record of G7 countries since 2019, is kaput.
As one Treasury figure observed: “It looks like the ONS have found some growth down the back of the sofa.”
Sunak will need plenty more luck lurking down there if he wants to still be in power at the start of the next school year.