If Rishi Sunak is going to lose, what should he do in the next nine months?

The prime minister could do the right things, which would mean no tax cuts, writes John Rentoul... but will he?

The big question now is what he should do with the time he has left (PA Wire)

The main significance of this week’s by-elections, for a prime minister hoping for something to turn up, is that nothing turned up. The voters confirmed that the public mood as portrayed by the opinion polls is accurate: people intend to vote Labour; they want the Conservatives out; and a chunk of the core Tory vote has defected to Reform.

Rishi Sunak can try his hardest to minimise Tory losses but his chances of avoiding defeat at the general election now depend on a big and unexpected disruption to national life.

Which means that the working assumption is that he has another nine months in No 10, before the election that he has pencilled in for 14 November – although I still think it could be 12 December, exactly five years after the last.

I noticed, incidentally, that the demand for a “general election now” is not as insistent as Keir Starmer likes to pretend. A We Think opinion poll this week found the cursed ratio: 48 per cent want an election “immediately”, while 52 per cent do not. Most are happy to let Sunak have his last few months in office.

So the big question now is what he should do with the time he has left. To which the obvious answer is that he should do the right things for the country. That is why the headlines this week, about Jeremy Hunt cutting future public spending plans to pay for tax cuts, struck such a discordant note. The last thing he and Sunak should be trying to do is buy votes. It is not going to work, and it is the wrong thing for the country.

There is not enough time now for the voters to feel so much better off by polling day that tax cuts or real pay rises are going to make a difference. In any case, the disaffection with the Conservatives seems to go deeper than numbers in voters’ bank accounts: we are near that cleansing moment in a democracy where the people decide that it is time for change.

Sunak should not be trying to buy votes; nor should he be hankering too hard to leave a legacy. Theresa May did that: because the end of her premiership was also advertised long in advance, she tried to bounce the Treasury into agreeing a big increase in education spending. When Philip Hammond said no, she latched on instead to a promise on the never-never: net zero carbon by 2050.

In a sense, Sunak has already done the right thing by trying to inject some democratic realism into that net zero target but the trouble is that too many people think he was trying to buy core Tory votes. Equally, I think he was right and brave to cancel the rest of HS2, releasing public investment for better use elsewhere. He should do more of that, making decisions that are in the national interest but that a Labour government might find hard to make.

Above all, though, he and Hunt should forget about tax cuts. Every public service is run down and in urgent need of more money. Many of them could do with a strong dose of radical reform too, of course, but the money comes first. The NHS, housing, criminal justice, asylum, defence: the demands are huge. People would always like to pay less tax but at the moment public opinion, faced with a choice between tax cuts and public spending, prefers better public services. The best legacy is to do the right thing.

The same goes for Starmer and Rachel Reeves if Labour wins. They must know that taxes are going to have to rise in the early years of a Labour government. Reeves needs to avoid boxing herself in any further by ruling out tax rises, even if it means that her definition of “closing tax loopholes” is going to have to be broad.

There is an interesting quotation from Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, in the extract from Tom Baldwin’s biography of Starmer published today. She says: “Keir is the least political person I know in politics … His natural instinct is, ‘Forget the politics – is this right or wrong?’”

She obviously thinks this is naive: “There’s lots of grey in politics – it’s not necessarily as clear-cut as that.” But usually, doing the right thing for the country is the best politics. That is why I was struck by something George Osborne said in his podcast with Ed Balls, Reeves’s predecessor as shadow chancellor. He suggested that a Labour government – he did say “if there is one” – should negotiate a customs union with the EU.

This would ease some of the barriers to trade with the EU and reduce the costs of Brexit. Indeed, it was essentially what Theresa May’s compromise withdrawal agreement sought to do. More significantly, Osborne observed that it would trap the Tory party. The Tories would be bound to oppose the policy and to promise to reverse it but this promise would become an albatross around their necks if the customs union was seen as good for jobs and pay.

Again, Labour should be careful not to rule out a customs union too emphatically before the election: ruling out rejoining the EU or its single market is one thing; anything else should fall under the heading of “making Brexit work better”.

Those, then, are my tests for the next nine months and the period immediately after the general election: will Sunak, and Starmer, “forget the politics” and do the right thing?