Rishi Sunak’s greatest mistake? He overpromised and underdelivered

From the moment he stepped out onto Downing Street and declared that his administration would have ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level’, technocrat Sunak was on a fast track to failure, says Sean O’Grady – and it was mostly his own fault

Rishi Sunak offered five bullet points for his administration, describing them as ‘the people’s priorities’ – but most were never fulfilled (AP)

After such an emphatic – if not downright rude – rejection by the electorate, it takes more than a little imagination to recall the day that Rishi Sunak became prime minister. On 25 October 2022, Sunak stood outside No 10 and made his first speech in charge of the country. In it, he made his first mistakes, too.

He promised – rashly, in hindsight – that the government he was to lead “will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. Given the already evidently wayward habits of his backbenchers, he probably should have taken that out at the draft stage. It did indeed become a terrible hostage to fortune, right up to and during the 2024 election campaign, when the scandal of insider betting broke.

Sunak also committed another unfathomable crime for a prudent politician – one that he was, tragically, to repeat time and again during his time in office. He overpromised. He said he would deliver on the 2019 manifesto – by then surely impossible, given the state of the public finances, as he knew better than most.

He even went so far as to itemise, bullet point style, the first of many lists of things to do, each one a rod for his own back: “Stronger NHS. Better schools. Safer streets. Control of our borders. Protecting our environment. Supporting our armed forces. Levelling up and building an economy that embraces the opportunities of Brexit, where businesses invest, innovate and create jobs.”

He followed that up in subsequent months with his famous list of the five “people’s priorities”, most of which were not fulfilled. The one that was (cutting inflation) was largely the work of the Bank of England. He failed to “stop the boats” or reduce NHS waiting lists. Last autumn, he cancelled the northern extension to the HS2 project, a flagbearer for the regeneration of the North and a rare substantial, tangible contribution to the “levelling up” agenda the Conservatives had pursued since David Cameron and George Osborne came up with the idea. That some of the HS2 money – none was actually “saved” – went instead to filling potholes in Leighton Buzzard, among other distinctly southern locations, was also grimly symbolic.

Sunak didn’t lie half as much as Boris Johnson, though some of his recent election propaganda has earned him rebukes from the civil service; yet he broke his promises just as readily as any of his predecessors. It’s not something that anyone should reasonably condemn a politician for doing – it’s how they roll, after all, and even the saintly Keir Starmer has been known to adapt policy positions to changing circumstances.

What went wrong with Sunak is that he nailed down so many of his promises and priorities, and so firmly, that he left himself zero wriggle room. In a way, it was refreshing, and ought to have boosted his image. But it didn’t, and he has been left making excuses, blaming others and looking like a failure. Worse still, the more he was reminded about the shortfalls by the opposition, the media, and the public during TV election debates, the more petulant and tetchy he became. He doesn’t seem to cope well when challenged.

The most cringe-inducing example of this has been the great immigration fiasco. The Rwanda plan – let us be frank – was dreamed up by Johnson and his then home secretary, Priti Patel, to show that they were doing “something” (ie anything) about the migration crisis. It was based on a misunderstanding of a scheme once pursued by the Australians, which involved their navy towing migrant boats out to international waters and ultimately to camps in a third country, which became so squalid that the entire policy was eventually abandoned.

The English Channel has no international waters; the Royal Navy didn’t want anything to do with it; and – given that Britain is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights – pulling it off was always going to be problematic. Johnson didn’t care about details – but Sunak did.

As chancellor, he made no secret of his opposition to the costly scheme. Privately, during his leadership bids, he wanted to scrap it – one insider telling the media that he “had no serious interest” in illegal or legal migration “until he was persuaded otherwise during the campaign”. Then, he turned it into a personal crusade – and one that ended up relocating one volunteer to Kigali at a cost of about £300m. It would have been cheaper to let the would-be migrant win the lottery every week for a year. Politically, Sunak’s attachment to a scheme described by his own home secretary as “bats***” is inexplicable.

Defined by the Rwanda scheme, and in contradistinction to his admittedly more anarchic predecessors, Sunak had difficulty defining himself. The early Sunak premiership was one of technocratic pragmatism – renegotiating the messy Northern Ireland protocol in Johnson’s Brexit deal; repairing relations with the EU, France and the US; getting the public finances under control; and governing by spreadsheet.

Then, gradually, Sunak evolved into a more militant culture warrior, ramping up provocative yet meaningless rhetoric such as “a man is a man, a woman is a woman – and that’s just common sense”. He said that at the 2023 party conference in Manchester – in the same speech, given in a hotel that had once been a railway station, as he announced that the rest of HS2 was to be scrapped.

It was then that he went off on an extraordinary odyssey to make himself “the candidate of change” – after almost a decade and a half of his party being in power. In a vain attempt to add credibility to this improbable mission, Sunak disowned the previous 30 years of British governments – including the entirety of the Major, Cameron, May, Johnson, and, more forgivably, Truss administrations. It was bewildering to the assembled activists, and to the country. The new Conservative slogan, “Be in no doubt, it is time for a change – and we are it”, was quietly canned.

When the time comes for Sunak to write his memoirs, he will find plenty of alibis readily to hand. The legacy he inherited was dreadful. To win a fifth consecutive term would be unprecedented, and – even with better luck – a struggle. He faced a Labour Party revived and repositioned. Brexit was over, and had been found to be a flop (and Sunak had always been a devout Eurosceptic). Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t undo most of the deal. The Covid pandemic and the energy crisis piled debt upon debt, and Tory tax rises – always denied – were real as well as inevitable.

But as well as overpromising and underdelivering, Sunak made plenty of his own errors. He made unwise appointments, whether out of weakness or not. Suella Braverman was a noisy, disloyal disaster at the Home Office, while his party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, had some well-publicised difficulties with his tax affairs. During the election campaign, two of Sunak’s own advisers became entangled in a betting scandal. He failed to anticipate how his vast wealth – and his wife’s non-dom status – would be resented in a country enduring a cost of living crisis.

Over time, Sunak became more accident prone, as with his “drowned rat” election announcement. That was bad luck, maybe, as was Nigel Farage’s decision to stage a comeback. But some of his manifesto ideas were so half-baked, they seemed to scream desperation: neither compulsory maths to 18 nor bringing back national service got the electorate excited.

Sunak made unforced errors, too. It was his decision to hold the election when he did, and to have a long campaign. It was he who chose to leave the D-Day commemorations early. No one made him say he’d had a deprived childhood because he wasn’t allowed Sky TV. It was also he who placed such primacy on tax cuts when the public simply wanted basic public services restored, trains that ran on time, and clean rivers.

Sunak was an unlucky prime minister; he is a talented man, but he is also one who, time and again, failed to sense the public mood. He has spent his life breaking barriers, chasing and winning glittering prizes: son of migrants, head boy at Winchester, a first from Oxford, Fulbright scholar at Stanford, Goldman Sachs, MP at 34, prime minister at 42, the youngest in recent history... only to be derided as a “pint-sized loser” by Angela Rayner, and a “P***” by one of Farage’s goons.

Losing the election will come as a crushing shock, all the more so when he reflects on his more avoidable blunders. The premiership came too soon for him. In a parallel universe, it would have been much better if he’d become party leader now, regrouped as leader of the opposition (a testing apprenticeship for a man who has only ever been on the governing side), and won the next election.

Still, he is only 44, and not short of money – and there are plenty more prizes left to chase.