Rishi Sunak should beware the dreaded pointed plan

Politicians of all parties love their plans, and Rishi Sunak’s latest set of promises is nothing new. Three point plans. Five point plans. Six point plans. Ten point plans. Perhaps the earliest ancestor of the breed dates back to President Woodrow Wilson’s grand “14 Points” to achieve lasting peace and justice after the First World War.

As the French premier of the day, Georges Clemenceau, remarked of the 14-clause plan for peace: “Even the good Lord had only 10.” Of course President Wilson’s lofty plan didn’t quite work out as planned, and that seems to be the case with most of its descendants.

The pointed plan carries many attractions. First, the convention is that each target tends to be brief, which means there’s no room for detail of specificity. That means a vast prairie of wriggle room once in office.

Second, if well-designed, they are easy to remember, for candidates and public alike. Third, they can be deployed handily on all sorts of campaign material, from deletion addresses to mugs to “pledge cards”, the latter most successfully by New Labour in 1997. As a result, the pledges are endlessly repeated, which helps with “messaging” and can endow them with familiarity and a spurious authority.

The downside, however, is that in government if you fail to deliver even on the most modest of aims, you could find yourself ridiculed. Someone on Ed Miliband’s team in the 2015 election campaign had the eccentric idea of underlining Ed’s granite determination to deliver his six key promises by carving them literally onto a giant piece of limestone – the now infamous “Ed Stone”. In doing so, the clumsy visual metaphor only undermined the Labour leader: as did the vaguenes of such aims as “an NHS with time to care”.

Our own John Rentoul called it “the most absurd, ugly, embarrassing, childish, silly, patronising, idiotic, insane, ridiculous gimmick I have ever seen”. The current whereabouts of this oversized socialist tablet of stone are unclear. It cost £7,614 and one British general election.

Boris Johnson’s six-point plan at the 2019 election is another interesting case study. Nestling under an overriding promise to “Get Brexit Done”, the menu was undeniably attractive to the core Leave vote demographic – populist and optimistic:

1) Extra funding for the NHS, with 50,000 more nurses and 50 million more GP surgery appointments a year.

2) 20,000 more police and tougher sentencing for criminals.

3) An Australian-style points-based system to control immigration.

4) Millions more invested every week in science, schools, apprenticeships and infrastructure while controlling debt.

5) Reaching Net Zero by 2050 with investment in clean energy solutions and green infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions and pollution.

6) We will not raise the rate of income, income tax, VAT or National Insurance.

At the moment, the first two haven’t been fully delivered, the points-based migration plan is in place but hasn’t reduced the rate of migration (as implied); the extra “millions” for apprenticeships probably have been, though trivial in the scale of public spending and perhaps not even in real terms, allowing for inflation; Net Zero is about 2050 anyhow, and progress is inadequate; and the tax promise has been explicitly and openly smashed, pleading Covid-19 as an excuse. When the next election comes, the Tories will score one or two, to the delight of the opposition.

No surprise then, that Sunak might want to quietly bury the 2019 programme along with Johnson’s reputation, and substitute his own five points. The Sunak plan, covering the economy, NHS waiting lists and migration are mostly timid and/or unspecific enough to declare done when the moment comes.

The exception is the bold, bald idea that he will stop the Channel small boat crossings. When and how is unclear, and, technically, just one boat would be a breach of the promise. To which Sunak replies that the public will decide if the pledges have been delivered. No argument there.