Can Rishi Sunak rescue the Tories from electoral wipeout?

'At least I’ve been prime minister' – those were the reported words of Liz Truss on realising that she had presided over so much chaos that she’d have to step down after just six weeks in office.

It is most unlikely that our next prime minister would react to catastrophic failure in such a manner. Because Rishi Sunak – and it will surely be him – is cut from a different cloth. Projecting himself as a success would appear to be his sustaining life force.

And yet catastrophic failure – on the electoral front at least – is by far the most likely outcome of his premiership. If it lasts two years he will have done well but it is perfectly possible to envisage it coming to a grisly end at a general election in early May next year, just six months in. For political precedent tells us that, while it is perfectly possible to oversee a decent economic repair job after an external shock and internal policy mistakes – which John Major and Ken Clarke did between autumn 1992 and spring 1997 – it is very much more difficult to avoid a punishment beating from the electorate afterwards.

The Conservative faction-fighting and self-obsession of recent weeks has been, if anything, even greater than it was in the early 90s. The Sauron’s Eye of the British public has watched balefully on as mortgage rates have surged, pension funds teetered and talk of tax rises and cuts in public services begun to intrude upon the boosterish economic fiction that went before.

By using the imperative of delivering stability to bat away calls for an immediate general election on grounds of his diminished legitimacy, Sunak can create a little space to put the foundations in place for repairing the public finances. But it would be a prodigious achievement, confirming the gifts as a communicator that he first displayed to the nation when stepping up as Chancellor during the Covid pandemic, for him to persuade the electorate not to enjoy their revenge on the Tories as a dish served cold whenever the next election does come around.

So, while elements of the Tory grassroots may seethe at the notion that 'Rishi the snake' is walking away with the most glittering prize UK politics can offer after bumping off one PM and standing wryly by as another collapsed, a far more rational response would be to salute his courage for wanting to take the job on at all.

The weeks ahead will certainly see him facing claims that he is dumping the levelling-up promise that powered Boris Johnson’s election win and returning to the blue wall Toryism of the affluent, southern counties.

He will have to claim otherwise, of course, talking himself up as a northern MP. But northern voters will take some persuading that a Hampshire-born billionaire Wykehamist sitting for one of the richest constituencies in North Yorkshire is going to be red wall-orientated.

As living standards fall and energy bills rise, the Labour party would have to be singularly inept not to land punishing blows both upon the Sunak prospectus of fiscal conservatism – 'austerity' – and his personal profile, replete as it is with green cards and non-domism. While Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair, neither is he a Michael Foot-style non-starter.

Sunak’s first major task will be to re-establish a high degree of unity among Tory MPs for the first time since before the EU referendum. He will probably never win round Johnson diehards such as Nadine Dorries, but a message of 'let’s hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately' should prove persuasive to the vast majority of MPs and then start percolating down into members of constituency associations.

Another cabinet and wider government reshuffle this week will be his first opportunity to get relations back on track. Dominic Raab, his most senior and uncompromising backer, will hope to get two old jobs back – deputy prime minister and foreign secretary – but expect Sunak to take a more balanced and less faction-based approach than did his short-lived predecessor. Backers of others – the Coffeys and Zahawis – need not start filling the packing crates just yet.

It is an encouraging indication of just how far we have moved on as a society that so little has been made of the most revolutionary aspect of the impending Sunak premiership: that he will be the United Kingdom’s first non-white prime minister. Yet for a Hindu to get the job during Diwali will set off even more fireworks than usual and instil such pride in that community that it could help to lock-in several hundred thousand desperately-needed votes for the Tories.

The keys to the kingdom are finally yours then, Rishi Sunak. Good luck – you are certainly going to need it.