What I got wrong (and right) in 2023

At the end of another turbulent 12 months in British politics, John Rentoul looks back at the predictions and forecasts he made throughout the year, and doubles down on why he believes we may soon have a hung parliament

A ‘super-rational but politically inept’ Rishi Sunak promised to ‘stop the boats’, not reduce them (PA)

This year, I made the mistake of assuming that people would be grateful not to have destructive fantasists in charge of the country. If they were, that gratitude was outweighed by the feeling that the party that had allowed destructive fantasists to be in charge, even for only seven weeks, could not be trusted.

So I was slow to realise how much damage the Liz Truss interregnum had done to the Conservatives.

Going back over my articles this year in the hope of learning from my mistakes, I tended to assume that Rishi Sunak would improve Tory fortunes because he offered basic competence and stability. I really ought to know better: this is not how politics works.

However, I did get one thing right. On Christmas Eve last year, I reviewed Sunak’s first two months as prime minister, and said: “If it is true that the way prime ministers come to power contains the seeds of their eventual fall, then Sunak’s end is already foretold: he will be driven from office because he is super-rational and politically inept.”

What I meant was that he had become prime minister despite having lost a leadership election in which he refused to tell his party members what they wanted to hear – in stark contrast to the way Keir Starmer won his leadership election two years earlier.

That analysis helps to explain why Sunak gained little credit for his competence. He has been “super-rational” in tackling the policy problems he faced. He renegotiated the Northern Ireland protocol to get a better deal called the Windsor Framework. He adjusted the nation’s path to net zero to make it more credible. He cancelled the rest of HS2 because he decided that there were better things the country could do with the money.

And he tried to stop the boats – but Emmanuel Macron and the Supreme Court wouldn’t agree to his “super-rational” solutions.

In every case, however, he handled the politics badly. The Democratic Unionist Party was excluded from talks on the Windsor Framework, and refused to restore devolved government in Northern Ireland as a result of it, which was half the point of the exercise. On net zero, Sunak looked as if he was weakening climate-change policy, when he claimed to be strengthening it by ensuring it had public support.

The “will he, won’t he” on HS2 dominated the headlines leading up to the Tory conference in Manchester – a city that will not now get an HS2 line – after The Independent reported that he was considering ditching it. And Sunak’s deal with Macron helped cut small boat arrivals by one-third, but he promised to “stop the boats”, not reduce them.

Even so, after the local elections in May, I was still writing articles headlined, “Why we need to be talking about a hung parliament.” Even now, I think that outcome is more likely than most people realise, but I accept that it is less likely than I thought it was. I should have been able to work out that the arithmetic of a hung parliament was changing because of what was happening in Scotland.

In February, I wrote that Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as leader of the Scottish National Party was caused by the failure of the independence project rather than the other way round. I think that was right, and I could not have foreseen the full implications of the police investigation, but I should have realised that the SNP’s crisis was an opportunity for Scottish Labour, whose leader Anas Sarwar I had met and been impressed by a few months earlier.

The prospect of Labour winning 20 or more seats in Scotland shifts the odds in favour of a majority for Starmer at the general election. Labour now needs to be only 5-8 percentage points ahead of the Tories in its share of the vote to have a majority in the Commons, whereas the previous calculation was that the party needed to be 10-12 points ahead.

One thing I believe I got right this year was that the Covid inquiry would be a waste of money and time, which I said before it was even set up. I wrote in May: “The point of an inquiry such as this, just as it was with Hutton and Chilcot, is to prove what ‘everyone knows’, and to bring the pre-identified guilty to account. When the inquiry finds, as it inevitably will, that it was all a lot more complicated than that, there will be the cry of ‘whitewash’.”

I predicted that, “in the meantime, there will be endless coverage – because it is fascinating – of who hated whom, and who said something tasteless or absurd in a fleeting communication in the heat of the moment”. As the circus rolls on, increasingly like a TV game show, and the prospect of useful lessons being learned for the next public health emergency recedes still further, my view remains a minority one, but now held by a larger minority than before.

Meanwhile, Suella Braverman was in trouble in May over suggestions that she had asked civil servants to arrange a private speed awareness course after she was caught speeding last year. In the end, she paid the fine and took the points on her licence, so she survived, but I predicted that “she will soon be looking for an excuse to resign over policy”.

I assumed that, with a view to running as the anti-immigration candidate in the next Tory leadership election, she would contrive a way of getting out of the Home Office before she could be held responsible for failing to get the numbers down. I did not foresee that she would be sacked and be so obviously furious about it. If she gained any support among Tory members for calling pro-Palestinian demos “hate marches” against Sunak’s wishes, she must have lost as much by her divisive and bitter letter to the prime minister.

Again, along with “super-rational” Rishi, I failed to appreciate the importance of emotion and pride in her behaviour – and, indeed, in the resignation of Robert Jenrick a few weeks later, annoyed that he wasn’t promoted to take Braverman’s place.

If I thought Sunak would fare better this year, Starmer’s friends have accused me of underestimating the opposition leader. It is true that, while I have welcomed his steady and ruthless revision of vote-losing policies, I have also pointed out that the remaining policies are not yet ready to “withstand the scrutiny of an election campaign”. In particular, I pointed out in June that the plan to borrow £28bn a year for green investment threatened to break shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s rules for fiscal prudence.

Within a week, she had announced that the plan had been postponed to the second half of the next parliament, and that it would be “subject to” her rule that debt had to be falling as a share of national income.

This leaves Reeves in the uncomfortable position of having ditched the policy while being unable to say so. The Tories can still accuse her of planning to borrow an extra £28bn a year, and Reeves can’t say she won’t, because that is still the policy if the debt rule will allow it (which it won’t). Labour has made more progress than I thought possible two years ago, but it is still not ready for government.

This may matter less than I thought it would in predicting what will happen at the election, in that it feels increasingly as if the British people have made up their minds that it is time for a change. But my view remains that Starmer is storing up trouble for after the election. Indeed, it is too early to audit some of the predictions that I made this year, because they relate to the short post-election honeymoon that Starmer and Reeves will enjoy, and the difficulties in which they will soon find themselves.

Their only comfort will be that the furies of irrationalism are likely to tear the Tory party to pieces after election defeat. If I have learnt anything this year, it is that there are an awful lot of Tory members who think the only thing wrong with Liz Truss’s 49 days in power was that she wasn’t bold enough.