The scores are on the doors: Sunak is a lame duck leader and under him the Tories are toast.
Changing Prime Minister again may seem ludicrous but in fact not changing him is more ridiculous still.
IT’S not even Christmas yet but Rishi Sunak’s goose is already cooked.
The Prime Minister has made a key strategic mistake in his choice of which voters to prioritise – an error which was crystalised in the public mind via his disastrous Cabinet reshuffle and failures on legal and illegal immigration levels - and as a result his party’s polling numbers are marooned in the mid-twenties.
But it is his personal ratings which really give the game away.
Sunak’s circle has long liked to boast that he is more popular than his party and overall this has been true for most of his brief premiership, albeit with the rider that many of those who held favourable views about him were never likely to vote Conservative anyway but were leftish voters who loathed his predecessors Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and warmed to him somewhat by comparison.
But here’s the thing: it’s not true anymore. Sunak’s latest net favourability rating on YouGov’s tracker is -49% (21% favourable, 70% unfavourable). That matches the Tory party’s terrible overall rating and amounts to a decline of 30 points since he became premier in October 2022.
It is only fair to note that declines in popularity tend to happen to all prime ministers over time. For instance, Johnson peaked in the high 20s net positive early in 2020, slumped to a record net negative of -53% halfway through 2022 and was -40% net by the time his party ditched him at the end of that summer.
But here’s the rub: even after Partygate, Pinchergate and all the other scandals, Johnson’s popularity with those who had voted Conservative in 2019 was still easily in overall positive territory at +17%. Sunak’s current rating with this key group of voters is -16%. So, among the coalition of voters that delivered the Tories their 80 seat majority four years ago, Sunak’s rating is 33 points worse than Johnson’s was even by the time he was ditched.
The conclusion is both stark and unavoidable: We have a Prime Minister who is acting as an active repellent to the very voters who hold it within their sway to rescue the Conservatives in time for the next election. One can also see this in the outlook of people who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum. Some 75% of them voted Tory in 2019, but only 27% say they intend to do so at the next election. And among these Leave voters, Sunak’s net favourability rating is -40%, while Johnson’s was -3% when he left office.
Whichever way you slice and dice the numbers, they point to the logic of ditching Sunak. His rating with 2019 Tory voters is seven points worse than is the party’s; his rating with Leave voters is ten points worse than his party’s; Suella Braverman is 21 points ahead of him in her favourability score with Leave voters (not that Mrs Braverman is currently the obvious or likely successor).
Of course, it does not follow that the Conservatives would automatically recover if they were to dump Sunak. There are many reasons to suppose they might not. For starters, Tory MPs would be asking the public to believe that their fourth different PM in a single term could be a transformative figure. Making yet another change at the top would surely also see the final ebbing away of whatever vestiges of mandate and legitimacy linger on from December 2019, so an early election would become inevitable – possibly as early as April.
It could also be that voters have just decided that they do not like or rate this cohort of Tory MPs in general and now actively wish to be rid of them as a governing force no matter who they install as their leader. Certainly, the public seems to be picking up on the idea that the Conservatives have become incoherent on the biggest issues and are split down the middle on the great philosophical question of modern politics: where to locate the boundary between nation state sovereignty and international obligations. We know where the competing parties – Labour, the Lib Dems, Reform – stand in terms of that divide. But Tory positioning is all over the shop.
And yet a compelling leader can make a huge difference. Sunak’s prioritising of geeky issues such as A-level reform or Artificial Intelligence at the expense of more mainstream concerns plus his chopping and changing of basic political identity that has seen him ultimately alight on the “liberal Conservative” brand of David Cameron have proved a huge turn-off to habitual Tory voters.
We are at a juncture in our national life where there is a growing appetite on the Right for a leader who will take the country by the scruff of the neck and drag it – kicking and screaming if need be – towards a more stable economic and social future. This is one reason why Nigel Farage is currently gaining in popularity and profile. While it is not my impression that Tory-leaning voters necessarily consider him the answer, they certainly do like the cut of his jib and that fact that there is no doubting where he stands on issues from taxation to law and order, immigration to Net Zero.
Compared to “iffy Rishi”, Farage is a conviction politician. Looking around the Cabinet table, Kemi Badenoch seems like the only substantial figure of whom the same could be said. Like Farage, she has the ability to make visceral connections with right-of-centre voters. Plainly, Sunak does not. I challenge anyone to identify a single moment in his 14-month Downing Street tenure when his words have emotionally moved Conservative-inclined voters.
So no wonder there is a growing school of thought around the idea that Mrs Badenoch might steer the party to a better election result than Sunak will be able to do.
The odds must be that Sunak will survive a confidence vote among his MPs should they reach the 53 letters threshold required to trigger one. But the main reasons for that will be the fact that they have already burned through two premiers since the last election and also know that no leader can magically unite the rival ideological factions within the parliamentary party.
But the polling numbers do not lie. A tentative centrist technocrat, frozen like a rabbit
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