What if Rishi Sunak – the heir apparent to the prime minister – is running out of time?

Voter appetite for the chancellor seems to be falling like a stone, writes Andrew Woodcock

Sunak’s chance may have come too soon and he may be reluctant to grab it (Reuters)

The conventional wisdom in Westminster is that chancellor Rishi Sunak is in pole position to inherit Downing Street when Boris Johnson finally succumbs to the Partygate scandal. But, equally, the shared opinion is that the chancellor would rather delay any contest because he isn’t ready yet and would rather have more time to prepare his strategy and get his team in place.

But what if, in fact, the heir apparent to the prime minister is running out of time? An intriguing detail in a survey carried out last weekend by Savanta ComRes showed that, while Keir Starmer’s popularity rating is riding high and Boris Johnson’s starting to recover after falling off a cliff in recent months, voter appetite for Sunak seems to be falling like a stone.

The chancellor’s “net favourability” rating, calculated by subtracting the percentage who are unhappy with his performance from those who are satisfied, plunged seven points last month to a record low since he entered the Treasury of +3.

While he admittedly remains in positive territory, something that can’t be claimed by Johnson, floundering at -34, Sunak’s current rating compares disastrously with the +17 he enjoyed this time last year and his high of +30 in September 2020. And while a prime minister may be able to survive a period of unpopularity between elections, it is not a platform from which an insurgent can mount a bid for the top job.

Of course, September 2020 was the point at which Mr Sunak was, uncharacteristically for a Tory chancellor, busy handing out cash as the state paid for companies to stay closed and workers to sit at home to halt the spread of Covid.

Now he is back in the more traditional position of being the minister who says No in cabinet, refusing to stump up cash for Mr Johnson’s elaborate dreams of new bridges and train lines or Michael Gove’s aspirations to “level up”. And he is also the minister tasked with paying the £400bn-plus bill for Covid, which he has set about doing by denying public sector workers pay rises, stripping £20 a week from universal credit claimants and slapping a 2.5 per cent hike – half each for employers and employees – on national insurance.

No matter how necessary any of these moves might be, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the politician implementing them very quickly starts looking less like Santa than Scrooge. And voters’ acceptance of the need to tighten belts is hardly encouraged when he announces at the same time that he is writing off £4bn lost to fraudsters in the crisis.

We are told that the chancellor has tucked away a little war chest to allow him to offer tax breaks nearer to election time.

But that is not going to help him if he finds himself thrust into a leadership election mid-term, when voters are struggling with soaring inflation and shrunken pay packets and when official figures tell us that Brexit has knocked 15 per cent off the UK’s trade with its former partners in Europe. And as a Resolution Foundation report finds that new migration rules are more likely to shrink companies’ dependence on migrant labour than increase wages for homegrown workers.

Tax rises, high inflation, skyrocketing prices and economic uncertainty do not make fertile soil in which a chancellor’s popularity can be expected to thrive. And for a man believed to be eyeing a bid for Downing Street, they can only make his prospects thinner and thinner as the weeks and months go by.

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Meanwhile, his principal rival for the top job – foreign secretary Liz Truss – has clearly learned PR lessons from the man they called “dishy Rishi”, developing her own brand as he did with artfully shot publicity photos and glossy Instagram posts.

If Sunak really wants to be prime minister, he may look at the prospects for the economy over the coming years and decide that the time to strike is now. The longer he waits, the more public memories of furlough and Eat Out to Help Out will fade and the more his name will be indelibly linked with economic misery.

No matter what the rules say about votes of confidence and letters from MPs, the one thing most likely to eject Boris Johnson from Downing Street would be the resignation of one or more senior ministers.

Sunak’s chance may have come too soon, and he may be reluctant to grab it. But political history shows that such chances come rarely, and politicians who fail to seize them may find they never come again.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor