Rishi Sunak faces an impossible job

Well, good luck, Rishi. You’ll need it – and not just because, as backbench Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope put it this morning, the Conservative party has become ‘ungovernable’. The whole job of prime minister has become impossible. There are too many demands on the person who holds that position, and too much blame placed on them when people’s lives fail to live up to expectation.

Liz Truss made a huge error in announcing a huge £100 billion welfare programme (the energy price guarantee) in conjunction with £45 billion of tax cuts, all uncosted. But would her premiership have proved much more successful had she been a bit more careful with her fiscal policy? Hardly. Had she been less generous with her energy price guarantee, she would have been accused of letting people freeze to death, or starve. Had she held back on tax cuts she would have been damned for that, too. Such are our expectations from the state that it has become politically impossible for any government to balance the books – which is why none has managed it in two decades. But then we blame the prime minister, too, when we are left with the inevitable result: gilt prices surging because investors have lost confidence in the government to repay its debts.

By contrast, we let off unelected officials far more easily. Whatever Truss’ failures, they were dwarfed by those of Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England who failed utterly in the most important aspect of his job: to sport and control inflationary pressures. As late as May 2021 he was still predicting that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) would peak at two per cent in 2022. Yet there is little pressure on him, and government ministers would be lambasted if they dared criticise him.

Or look at how Boris Johnson was blamed for the first wave of covid, and accused of ‘ignoring the scientists’ when it was plain all along that he was trying to follow every word of advice from Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, and Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer. They were lauded for the work they did, while the Prime Minister was damned for taking their advice.

All the nation’s frustrations are now focussed on this one person who sits at the top of our democratic system. We expect them to end poverty and hunger, make us rich, protect us from infectious disease, stop climate change. Meanwhile, they must avoid any politically-incorrect utterance – as well as manage the mouths of several hundred MPs. We expect them to be on top of the daily crises and pseudo-crises created by the demands of 24-hour rolling news – as well as beam their thoughts on the horizon and solve longer-term issues.

Within my lifetime, Britain has had two prime ministers who managed to cling on and brave the brickbats for over a decade. But I don’t expect it to happen again. We have dialled up the pressure just too far. Ironically, our expectations of the PM have been going up while our own tolerance of stress has been going down. The general population asserts ever greater entitlement to shorter hours, more holiday and time off if the pressure becomes too great. Yet we expect the PM to be omnipresent, with their performance under constant surveillance. The space in office once enjoyed by prime ministers has been entirely eroded.

So good luck, Rishi. If you last until the next election, let alone beyond it, you will have done well.