Would a Boris-Rishi pact work?

There is generally a basic problem to be overcome whenever somebody suggests two competing political egos come together to campaign on a ‘joint ticket’ – one of them has to be the boss.

There is only one vacancy being fought over by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak and it cannot be subject to a job share. It is not, after all, the political editorship of the Guardian at stake here, but prime minister of the United Kingdom.

It can be surmised that Sunak and Johnson will have had very different ideas about what a pact between them might look like when they met last night for extensive talks.

Sunak will likely have favoured himself occupying No. 10, with Johnson either supporting him from the backbenches or serving again as foreign secretary, with extra authority to shape the agenda on the war in Ukraine. ‘I’ll deal with the home front, you bestride the global stage, together we’ll be unbeatable.’

Johnson will surely have had a different outcome in mind: him back in Downing Street and Sunak as deputy PM with an enhanced role implementing the domestic agenda at a time when, in the immortal words of Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne, ‘there is no money’.

In the end, the details of such arrangements are little more than window dressing. The core issue is that whoever becomes PM can sack whoever doesn’t and that will make him a lot more than first among equals.

Sunak, acting with Johnson’s blessing, would appear to have the better chance of running a stable administration that can start digging Britain out of its post-Covid financial hole, given his large lead in overall nominations and especially among the experienced ministerial class of MPs.

Yet Johnson, back in the hot seat with Sunak’s support, would give the Tories the best chance of staving off the clamour for an early general election – given the unexpired mandate won from the British public under his leadership in 2019.

Whichever figure comes out on top, he will find himself struggling to keep to the spirit of the platform the Tories fought on in that campaign, with its emphasis on higher spending on public services such as defence and the NHS and upon infrastructure-driven ‘levelling up’ investment. In the words of one former minister: ‘It’s going to be bloody and awful and indeed bloody awful for whoever is in charge.’

Perhaps Johnson presiding over a new burst of austerity and seeking to limit its scale would go down less badly in the red wall seats that turned Tory three years ago than Sunak the billionaire overseeing savage public spending cuts from the deck of the new heated swimming pool at his mansion in North Yorkshire.

On the other hand, the wise counsel of Boris’s friends, such as Charles Moore, is telling him to sit this one out. They say Rishi has a more suitable ‘skill set’ to face the current predicament, and can keep intact the fragile confidence of financial markets.

What appears certain is that neither man can have a successful premiership without the goodwill of the other. Should Sunak and all the other ministers who resigned from the Johnson administration in July refuse to serve under him in November, Johnson would be left in charge of a mixed-ability fan club of frontbenchers rather than a sensible government. But were Johnson to view a Sunak premiership gracelessly, the narrative of betrayal would infect his relationship with his party.

If Johnson really can get 100 nominations from Tory MPs, as his supporters insist that he can, then he has the bigger call to make. Despite all of Sunak’s momentum, and after securing the support of grassroots darlings like Kemi Badenoch, few would bet against Boris winning a members’ ballot.

But putting the Big Dog on a short leash – imposed by bond and currency traders while the entire non-Tory media takes daily pot shots – hardly seems like a recipe for success.

Does he really want to fight Sunak to the last, just to lead through a tricky period with depleted stocks of political capital? Wouldn’t the risk of it all turning into a disaster – in Parliament, across Whitehall, on the financial markets – be too great to make this a sensible course?

Then again, there is always the question of whether his ambition still burns so fiercely that he can do no other. As the scorpion is fabled to have said while stinging the frog upon whose back he was hitching a ride across treacherous waters: ‘It’s in my nature.’