Rishi Sunak’s headline-grabbing gimmickry will backfire with voters

The prime minister ought to remind himself of the basics of good communication: ‘show, don’t tell’ and ‘under-promise, over-deliver’, writes John Rentoul

Sunak appears to be imitating New Labour at its most vacuous (PA)

After a spell when Rishi Sunak seemed to be bringing a welcome measure of competence and substance to government, he and his ministers seem determined to revert to the bad old ways of governing by announcement, re-announcement and gimmick.

Perhaps we should be grateful that they haven’t reverted to the dysfunction and leadership crises of last year, but most people probably prefer the prime minister who started this year to the one who is now responsible for a series of empty headline-grabbing initiatives.

In January, Sunak set out his five priorities for the year, which were mostly serious and credible. He renegotiated the Northern Ireland protocol, restored good relations with Emmanuel Macron of France and worked with Jeremy Hunt to present a Budget that didn’t immediately self-combust.

Since then, however, he has appeared to imitate New Labour at its most vacuous, and even to resurrect a series of media storylines from that period. There was a distinctly retro feel to the announcements on antisocial behaviour, about “immediate” justice for thugs made to clean up their own graffiti.

This week, the dead zone of the parliamentary recess has been used by No 10 for stories about barges to house asylum seekers, a “crackdown” on grooming gangs, and a new plan for sewage. These are all emotive issues, and the thinking behind the media grid is transparent: the government wants to be seen to be active in dealing with things that groups of voters feel strongly about. Especially in the run-up to local elections that are seen as an important test of Sunak’s vote-winning powers. But it is so transparent and substance-free that it risks being counterproductive.

The plan to put asylum seekers on permanently moored ships is definitely of New Labour vintage. It is the option of last resort whenever the asylum backlog grows and the Home Office has run out of other places to put people who are waiting for their claims to be assessed.

The Labour government talked about it, but never actually did it. Instead, it used a barge as a floating prison to deal with a different crisis of overcrowding, although that was closed down in 2006. Now the government is reported to have signed a deal for an accommodation barge that was originally used to house workers building the Shetland Gas Plant. It was used by the Dutch government to house asylum seekers in 2005, but was condemned as an “oppressive environment” by a watchdog. The owners say it has since been refurbished, but it is still the same boat.

It feels like a deliberately punitive gesture, designed to do two things: to appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment among voters, and to deter people from crossing the Channel in small boats. It is likely to do neither.

As for the “crackdown” on grooming gangs, that seems to be an excuse for Suella Braverman, the home secretary, to blame “political correctness” for failing to identify men of Pakistani origin as a particular problem, when her own department’s research said that the problem was not confined to that particular group. As for a new legal duty on professionals to report any suspicion of child sex abuse, I do not have space to list the ways in which it is a trivial, irrelevant or counterproductive measure.

Finally, there is the “crackdown” by Therese Coffey on polluting water companies, and her plan to ban plastic wet wipes. She did try in her speech today to explain that dealing with sewage overflows is “not straightforward”, and it is not her fault that a consultation on banning plastic wipes was first announced five years ago. It looks as if the ban might finally happen this time, but her speech shied away from making the necessary point that, if people want faster investment in upgrading Victorian sewage systems, they will have to pay for it.

Sunak ought to remind himself of the basics of good communication, which he followed in the negotiations on the Windsor Framework for Northern Ireland. Show, don’t tell. Under-promise, over-deliver. Be straight instead of thinking you can bamboozle people with “new” policies that didn’t work before. Be straight with the voters about difficult problems, setting out priorities, targets and progress towards them.

It is time to return to his strengths: modesty and competence.