In one sense at least, Sunak has shown he truly is the heir to Blair

Rishi Sunak is good at interviews. He is quick, fluent, and explains himself in ways that people can understand even if they don’t agree. He is truly the heir to Blair.

Tony Blair’s greatest strength was Bipartisan Reasonablism. Sunak deployed the Master’s tricks even on the difficult subjects, where public opinion is divided (though it is mostly against him). He made the case for not paying nurses more in a way that sounded completely reasonable even if it was politically unwise. Yes, nurses are exceptional, he agreed with Piers Morgan, and yes, they should be treated differently, which is why they alone had a pay rise when other public sector workers didn’t.

But if the nurses were paid even more, he said, the money would have to come from taxes or from cuts to other public spending, and if lots of public sector workers were paid more it would keep inflation going, which wouldn’t help anyone, including nurses. It is an argument that might have more support among voters than the top lines of virtue-signalling opinion polls suggest.

Even so, you cannot help thinking that the political thing to do, and what Blair would probably have done, would be to give nurses a one-off payment and try to hold the line there. Sunak disarmingly pre-empted that thought: “Look, I would love to give the nurses a massive pay rise. Who wouldn’t? Certainly would make my life easier, wouldn’t it?”

But no, he implied, he was going to do the difficult but right thing. He was going to be Scrooge.

His plan for the election is transparent. It is to do the unpopular thing now in the hope that he will earn some grudging credit for it in a year’s time, when inflation will be at 3 per cent if yesterday’s Bank of England forecast is right.

The other part of the plan is for Sunak to throw himself on the mercy of the voters, saying: “Here are some modest but believable promises of what I hope to achieve in the next year.” His five promises have been mocked as things that are likely to happen anyway, but they still constitute a risk – especially the promise to “stop the boats”, which Sunak himself admitted might be difficult. They are a risk not because of the precise terms of the promises themselves – that inflation will halve and the economy will grow – but because people will judge him by what they think he should have delivered by the election, not by what he actually promised.

In that, he will be haunted by the poor reputation of his party, just as in the Morgan interview he was, like Scrooge, haunted by the ghosts of prime ministers past.

He was rude about his inheritance from Liz Truss without mentioning her by name, saying he had put himself forward for “what was going to be a nightmare job” out of a sense of duty to put right the markets’ loss of confidence in the government. But he was polite about Boris Johnson, who managed like a time-travelling poltergeist to be quoted by Morgan from a pre-recorded interview to be shown the following night.

Sunak said it was “great” that Johnson was showboating in Kyiv with President Zelensky (not Sunak’s precise words), and remarked: “I speak to all former leaders, actually.” (I bet Blair is the most useful, and I wonder if he has spoken to Truss.)

Morgan followed up with the forensic supplementary: “You’ve got no problem with what Boris is doing?” Sunak gushed: “No, gosh, as I say we’ve got a long list of previous prime ministers, and the fact that they still want to contribute is great.”

Indeed, the most surprising thing about the interview was how soft Morgan was. The contender for the title of the second-toughest interviewer after Andrew Neil did indeed give Sunak a hard time on parking charges for nurses. After the more substantive exchanges on nurses’ pay generally, this seemed a little off the point. But it was the one part of the interview where Sunak risked coming unstuck, resorting to his giveaway habit of repeating a sentence to give himself time to think of the next one.

The prime minister’s logical brain nearly led him into sounding irritated with the complaints of angels – whose job is saving lives, Morgan reminded him – at having to pay to park at hospitals. Everyone would like getting to work to be cheaper, Sunak said. Why should we subsidise car-driving nurses rather than bus-riding ones, he managed to stop himself saying.

Morgan used up some of the interview expressing his own views, which Sunak happened to agree with, and then ended it by telling Sunak that he hoped he succeeded. I was half expecting Morgan to turn to the camera and sign off with “Vote Tory.” He did not end his interview with Keir Starmer 18 months ago by telling him he hoped Labour would win.