Why has Rishi Sunak let Labour accuse him of wanting to grind the faces of the poor?

I am returning to this question because I’m not sure that anyone has yet answered it satisfactorily. We can assume three things, I think. One is that the government will keep universal credit at its higher “temporary” rate beyond its original expiry date in April. The second is that Rishi Sunak is clever. The third is that he wants to be prime minister. 

Hence the mystery. Why did the chancellor force his colleagues to go through the embarrassment of Monday’s debate in the Commons, opposing a Labour motion calling on the government to do what it is going to do anyway? 

Indeed, Boris Johnson and Mark Spencer, the chief whip, found the vote so awkward that they ordered Conservative MPs to abstain. The prime minister told his MPs that Labour had used its “army of Momentum trolls” to “lie” about Commons votes before, so “I have decided not to give them that opportunity”. That meant Labour “won” the vote by 278 to 0 – although, as it was a mere declaratory motion, it has no legal effect. 

But why not deny Labour the propaganda opportunity by deciding to do now what the chancellor is bound to announce in the Budget in March? The government could have announced that the extra £20 a week on universal credit would continue for, say, at least six more months. But it would seem that Sunak refused to bow to the inevitable, and Johnson decided not to overrule him. 

You can see why Johnson wouldn’t want to get into a fight with his chancellor, especially if the prime minister thinks he will get his way eventually. But why is Sunak resisting? Why court unpopularity now when he knows he will have to give in later? 

The best explanation I can come up with is that he thinks the best politics is the best economics, to quote a phrase much used by Professor Ed Balls. Sunak may be genuinely worried that spending an extra £6bn a year on universal credit indefinitely is not the best use of scarce resources.  

He may ask, as did Robert Colvile, one of the co-authors of the Conservative manifesto, whether, if the government has that sort of money available, it would be better spent on, say, social care rather than higher universal credit. 

Of course, if the pressures are such that Sunak is going to have to give in over universal credit anyway, you might think an ambitious politician would just agree to it, and accept the applause of Tory MPs who are demanding it. Tory MPs decide the final two candidates in a leadership election, and more of them seem to want Sunak to keep spending money he hasn’t got than want him to balance the government’s books on the backs of people with low incomes. 

But long-term reputations are more than just doing whatever the fickle parliamentary party wants at any one time. The point of Professor Balls’s motto is that simply giving the crowd what it wants will work only in the shortest of terms. Even if he knows he is likely to lose this particular argument, Sunak may feel he has to resist so that he is better placed to fight other battles to restore some semblance of sustainability to the public finances. 

“How can a government that spends billions on mass testing quibble over helping the low paid?” asked Paul Waugh of HuffPost – and that will probably be the decisive argument when it comes to Johnson and Sunak agreeing the Budget. But there is always a difference, in Treasury thinking, between the one-off costs of emergencies and recurring spending that stretches into the unknown future.  

Assuming that Sunak is thinking about his own unknown future, he has to calculate how much of today’s arguments over public spending will be remembered by the MPs and Tory party members who will choose Johnson’s successor. He may hope that the big-spending wing of the party will remember the furlough scheme, while the fiscally responsible wing will remember that he at least tried to keep control of spending.  

That is quite a balancing act, but it seems shrewd as a bet on what politics will be like by the time of the next Tory leadership election. The party may be looking for someone who is surprisingly “Labour” in his compassion for the less well-off, but who can pose as a better steward of the nation’s finances than the actual Labour Party.