The Conservative Party developed many vices towards the end of its 14 years in power, but one of the most damaging must be its modern fixation on “unity”.
Perhaps that sounds odd – after all, isn’t the old saying is that divided parties won’t win? But there is no contradiction: the Tories’ problem is that by the end, the were so divided that the only way to maintain at least an outward appearance of unity was to lapse into something close to paralysis.
No man ought to know this better than Rishi Sunak. There is no doubt that he received an absolute hospital pass when he took over from Liz Truss in 2022 with the unenviable mission of trying to un-sink a ship she had managed almost to scuttle in just 50 days.
Yet even allowing for that, his premiership was one of extraordinary inertia. A recent interview with The Times really drives home the weird disconnect between Sunak’s obvious ability, sincerity, and capacity for hard work, and the baffling triviality of his government.
Superficially, there are mea culpas over the general election result. “I spent too much time talking about the what and how and not enough about the why,” he says. “I wasn’t the best version of myself as PM.”
Yet there’s also a curious unwillingness to engage with why his Tory party stumbled so badly.
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The most significant policy that gets a mention, in the context of Reform UK riding public concern about immigration to the top of the polls, is the Rwanda scheme. But controversial as that was, on its best day, it could only ever have been a test pilot for a broader deportation programme which never took shape.
In a way, the story of that policy perfectly embodied both what Sunak tried to do and why he failed. Lacking any consensus amongst Conservative MPs about trying to change Britain’s treaty obligations, he and his advisors bent over backwards to make sure the Rwanda scheme was compliant with them. The result was a string of damaging court defeats and the wasting of political time the Tories didn’t have.
Beyond that, there’s precious little. Sunak mentions that he’s proud to have brought in the permanent smoking ban for younger people – a measure which has not yet been actually passed into law and may never, due to complications arising over Northern Ireland. And that’s about it.
Whatever one thinks of that policy, it was and remains an odd priority for a prime minister who took office when the United Kingdom was (and remains) stuck in arguably the longest and most structural economic slump – in productivity, wage, and per-capita GDP growth – since the Industrial Revolution.
Nowhere mentioned, by contrast, is public spending and the state of the nation’s finances. This would be a strange omission from any ex-prime minister’s assessment of their fortunes, but on the surface it is especially baffling for Sunak, a newly hired Goldman Sachs man who served as chancellor.
And Sunak’s first Sunday Times economics column focuses squarely on Rachel Reeves’ Budget dilemmas, with no mention of what Kemi Badenoch might do in response. So what’s going on?
There are at least two possibilities. The first is that Sunak, who clearly (and contrary to cynical suggestions he would decamp to California) does not see himself as done with politics, doesn’t want to be unhelpful to Badenoch. Perhaps he remembers the huge damage done by Margaret Thatcher’s determination to be “a good backseat driver” to John Major.
With management of the economy the one key area on which some polls still give the Tories an advantage, the absolute last thing a good team player wants to do is give the press an excuse to start writing about Tory divisions on tax and spending.
The other, more worrying possibility is that he genuinely doesn’t understand the extent to which it was the economy which doomed his government.
Recall that it was Sunak who, as chancellor, froze income tax thresholds, breaking a long-held principle of British taxation. He ended up fighting the 2024 election on a platform of substantial and continual stealth tax increases on working people, but with carve-outs for pensioners – what he and Jeremy Hunt denounced as “Labour’s pension tax” was in fact merely the Opposition’s refusal to exempt pensioners from the Tories’ everyone tax.
In those conditions, it is not remotely surprising that the age at which the average voter flips to the Tories is now comfortably over 60. Yet despite the last election proving beyond doubt that you cannot win a national election as the party of the pensioner interest alone, Badenoch remains imprisoned by the Tories’ dependence on those voters.
At this year’s party conference, shadow Chancellor Mel Stride committed to another 10 years of the pension triple lock, a hugely expensive commitment to maintain unrestricted wealth transfers to what is, on average, this country’s wealthiest age cohort. In the main hall, a huge poster boasted of the party’s opposition to Reeves’ attempt to means test the winter fuel allowance.
The brute reality of Britain’s fiscal situation is that the three spending areas pushing public spending endlessly upwards are pensions, social care, and the NHS. Absent bold action on one or more of those there is no scope for any government cutting taxes on working people.
Unfortunately, the Tories remain unwilling or unable to have an honest debate about that – a debate in which Sunak ought to be playing a leading role, given that he personally tested the alternative to destruction in 2024.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of Conservative Home, a blog which is independent of the Conservative Party
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