What I got wrong in 2022: How badly Conservative Party members wanted to believe in fairytales

Our chief political commentator John Rentoul looks back over his predictions for the year

I simply could not see how Johnson, party members, Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng could all make such disastrous decisions (Getty)

I have to admit that Dominic Cummings was right. In his prediction for 2022, he said there was an “85 per cent chance” that a new prime minister would take over. I didn’t quantify my assumption so precisely, but I too started the year thinking that Boris Johnson was unlikely to survive it. Looking back over my articles this year, I must report in all humility that I sometimes got it right.

Although Johnson had won a stay of execution when the police announced an investigation into lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street, I thought he had become a liability to his party. By 5 February, I said: “We are at the last-moment doubts stage of the defenestration of Boris Johnson. Conservative MPs have decided that the prime minister must go. What is holding them back is not knowing what will happen next. They think Rishi Sunak would win the leadership election, but they cannot be sure.”

I had no idea that we were going to end up with Liz Truss as prime minister for seven weeks, followed by Sunak being imposed on a reluctant Conservative Party in the country by MPs, but I had an inkling that what the Tory party should do and what it would do might not be the same.

Where I got it wrong was a failure of imagination: I simply could not see how Johnson, party members, Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng could all make such disastrous decisions.

One of my mistakes was to think that Liz Truss would be unable to overcome her Remainer past. I said on 16 April: “My view is that any Leaver would defeat any Remainer among party members in the final stage of a Tory leadership election.” So when Sunak was down, after the revelations of his wife’s non-dom status and his US green card earlier that month, I thought, on 23 April, that Michael Gove “could still become prime minister”. He seemed the most credible of the remaining Leavers. That wasn’t wrong, as such; it is just that I was thinking in a different plane.

While Cummings and I thought that Sunak was “out of it” – as Cummings put it in an interview with Suzanne Moore at the end of May – I began to think that Johnson might hold on for a while. On 4 June, when he was booed going into St Paul’s for the platinum jubilee service, I said he “may still be prime minister this time next year”.

Two days later, Tory MPs triggered a confidence vote, and Johnson won by 211 votes to 148. I wrote that the result was “in the middle of the grey zone of neither winning decisively nor losing”. Johnson was “holed below the waterline and sinking slowly”. I went back to thinking he would be ousted within weeks. The 12-month rule, forbidding another confidence vote within a year, was “no protection”, I said, because the 1922 Committee would scrap it at the next opportunity.

No one could have predicted the incident that finally got Johnson out, although it was all too easy to guess that it might involve his saying something that didn’t seem true. It wasn’t the conduct of Chris Pincher, recently promoted to deputy chief whip, that did for his boss, but Johnson appearing to pretend that he hadn’t been warned about it. On 5 July I wrote: “The end of Johnson’s premiership could take hours or weeks but the sky is definitely getting darker now.”

That evening, Sunak resigned as chancellor, and two days later Johnson announced he would be leaving office as soon as a successor was chosen. Sunak was first out of the traps, on 9 July, with a video warning against “fairytales”, which I said was “brave to the point of folly”. More like Luke Skywalker than a superforecaster, I had a bad feeling about this: “Sunak has shown the kind of courage that only a front runner can, by setting himself up as the candidate who will tell people that the years of pretending that you can eat your cake and still have it are over. Let us see if the Conservative Party is ready for its appointment with reality.”

I had no idea how unready the party would be, but by 27 July I thought it was all over for Sunak.

I never thought that Truss would be a success as prime minister. But I completely misjudged how she would fail. I assumed that, once elected, she would reverse her campaign promises and would refuse to cut taxes by more than a token amount – and that she would be destroyed by her supporters’ sense of betrayal. Instead, she went the other way, and was destroyed by the markets.

Again, I had a bad feeling about the mini-Budget, while lacking the imagination to conjure up the full horror of it: “Kwarteng will be doing the equivalent next week of trying to land a plane in fog having turned off the radar, because he refused to ask the OBR for its forecasts.”

I don’t claim any prescience for realising the moment Kwarteng had delivered his statement on 23 September that it had been disastrous: “You could see the perplexity written on Tory MPs’ faces. ‘Tax cuts for the rich at a time of hardship for the many’ is not a slogan on which they expected to fight the next election.”

But even a week later, I didn’t think that Tory MPs would in effect reverse the result of the leadership election: “It would only be possible for a government to regain the respect of the voters under a new prime minister, and the only credible candidate – apart from Keir Starmer – is Rishi Sunak. I don’t believe that Conservative MPs have the unity, will and discipline to make that happen, so I think they, too, are doomed.”

Talk about over-correction. I had been wrong about the Conservative Party all year, assuming that it would respond rationally to the failure of the Johnson government, not realising how MPs’ attempts to limit the electoral damage would be sabotaged by party members who believed fairy tales about Boris betrayed or tax cuts paid for by borrowing. So I assumed the party would stumble on to disaster.

Instead, the MPs succeeded in their damage limitation exercise. Sunak has a chance to rescue something from the wreckage, which is what I thought at the start of the year would happen – although what I failed to predict was quite how bad the wreckage would be.