Rishi Sunak is starting to look like a normal politician again

The chancellor is still the most popular politician in the UK, and the only one with a net positive rating – a distinction that was once held for some time, before he became prime minister, by Boris Johnson. But it was a truism that Rishi Sunak’s popularity would not last when bills to pay for the policies that earned him the public’s approval started to be presented.

Last week was the week when Rishi Sunak came back down to Earth and started to look like a normal politician again. The Budget itself was generally well received, but it crystallised the realisation that the Conservatives are a high-tax as well as a high-spending party, and that puts the chancellor back among the ranks of mere mortals.

Public opinion may be resigned to the need to pay for furlough, business support and testing during the pandemic, and it may accept the argument for higher taxes to clear the NHS backlog and maintain public services generally, but the people “don’t like it”, as Sunak himself said in his Budget speech. “I don’t like it, but I cannot apologise for it,” he said. “It’s the result of the unprecedented crisis we faced and the extraordinary action we took in response.”

This is not quite true, in that much of the increased public spending over the next three years is not pandemic-related, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out. Instead, it reflects Johnson’s determination to avoid the A-word, austerity, and his intuition that the British people may grumble about high taxes but that they would grumble more about cuts to schools, police and courts.

For Sunak, this is a problem. He wants to stick to not just the traditional Treasury belief that higher public spending is often wasted, but to the traditional Tory belief with which it happens to coincide. Someone who wants to be prime minister has to pay attention to the views of the MPs and party members who will choose the next leader. Hence the chancellor’s rather-too-obvious straddle, facing both ways and declaring in his Budget speech, “My goal is to reduce taxes”, having just put them up to a level not seen since the postwar Labour government.

The straddle became even more uncomfortable when he addressed Conservative MPs that evening, saying: “It is my view that going forward every marginal pound we have should be put into lowering people’s taxes, not more spending.”

I am not sure he meant to be so categorical. Those words are a hostage to fortune, because unexpected things happen and he will come under pressure from No 10 and some Tory MPs to spend on things for which he hasn’t budgeted. Other Tory MPs will then demand that the money be devoted to tax cuts instead.

Sunak has always made mistakes – all politicians do. It was a mistake for him to say quite so bluntly in September that social care was a new role for the government and “we need a permanent new way to fund it”, which upset small-state Tory MPs. But now that he has returned to Earth, his mistakes are going to count against him. Welcome back, chancellor.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator