Rishi Sunak has done everything right – but politics is unfair

We have reached the stage when people feel sorry for Rishi Sunak.

Some of the Conservative MPs who have been canvassing for the by-election in Selby, North Yorkshire, say that the mood of voters has moved beyond anger to “pity”.

How did it come to this? Sunak is on any metric the most capable prime minister that the Conservatives have offered since Margaret Thatcher. He has done all the right things since he took office, as confirmed by the leader of the opposition, who proposes to do nothing important differently.

Sunak is decent, personable and hardworking, and yet the British people seem to have decided to dispense with his services in favour of an unknown quantity. What a lesson in the unfairness of politics.

The reasons for the prime minister’s difficulties are not hard to describe. People feel poorer, public services are in a patchily terrible state, and the Conservative Party has forfeited trust. Much of what Sunak is doing right consists of trying to repair the damage done by his own party.

It was the Conservative Party that gave us Liz Truss as prime minister, in defiance of Sunak’s clear and correct warning that unfunded spending was dangerous. The resulting loss of confidence in the Tories’ ability to manage the economy – or, indeed, anything – has been catastrophic.

The parallels with two other historical unfairnesses are striking. The Tories suffered lasting damage from the humiliation of the pound being devalued in 1992, with the collapse of John Major’s policy of pegging it to other European currencies.

This was despite the policy mix being precisely right for the British economy: a period of high interest rates and credible long-term expectations of low inflation, followed by an easing accompanied by a new inflation-targeting regime. Thus Norman Lamont, who was sacked as chancellor for getting it right, laid the foundations of a decade and a half of steady growth – for which Gordon Brown took the credit.

However, Brown was then the victim of the second great injustice, when he was blamed for the financial crash in 2008. It had a similar effect on Labour’s reputation, although the party was blameless in the bursting of a bad debt bubble in America. Again, Brown did all the right things in organising the global response, which was to borrow to protect jobs and to stave off a deeper recession. But his reward from the voters was to be evicted from No 10.

The Truss-Kwarteng experiment was trivial by comparison. She was only prime minister for 49 days, many of which were taken up with mourning the Queen. There were a mere 21 days between Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget and his replacement by Jeremy Hunt.

Most of the damage done by Kwarteng to the pound, to interest rates and to confidence in the British economy was quickly reversed. But the damage done to the Conservative Party’s reputation is deep and lasting. It has been reinforced by a cynical Labour campaign to claim that the Tories “crashed the economy”. This is untrue and unfair, but the Tories did it to Labour after 2008, so they can hardly complain.

Hunt and Sunak put right what Kwarteng and Truss got wrong, but the global economy meant that we were in an inverse D:Ream situation – things could only get worse. It turns out that putting right the mistakes of your Tory predecessors, and protecting people first from a pandemic and then from world inflation and interest rates, is not enough to appease an electorate that thinks 13 years is long enough for a governing party to show some signs of progress.

Sunak should have been praised to the skies for fixing the Northern Ireland protocol of Boris Johnson’s botched Brexit deal. That breakthrough, grandiosely called the Windsor Framework, has made possible the agreement that the prime minister hopes to sign on Tuesday that allows the UK to rejoin Horizon, the EU’s science programme.

But not even Sunak has been able to persuade the Democratic Unionist Party to return to government in Northern Ireland, and, as it was a Tory prime minister who negotiated the wrong sort of Brexit in the first place, the gratitude of the voters is limited.

Things may go on getting worse for Sunak for a while, but we are still more than a year away from the likely date of the next election. Events will disrupt any assumptions, but the gap between government and opposition in the opinion polls narrowed before the elections of both 1997 and 2010. And David Cameron failed to win a majority after the Labour calamity of 2008.

If the voters are feeling sorry for Sunak, does that suggest that there is some goodwill towards him yet to be recovered – or does it mean that they have given up on him?