If you can bear it, let me take you back to the Conservative Party leadership election in the summer of 2022.
Last week of July. Rishi Sunak appears in a Barbour jacket with a leafy landscape in the background and talks about the “extremely valuable” green belt. He says it is unacceptable that “green belt land is being used for development”. If he is elected leader of the conservative faction and therefore prime minister, he will “put an end to this”.
This was the strangest of sights. As chancellor, Sunak enjoyed great prestige at the Treasury. During his time in 11th place he was consistently praised for understanding the UK’s productivity problems, and certainly the laws of supply and demand, better than most.
When did he become such an enthusiastic advocate of the so-called green belt swallowing prime development areas? What might be his motivation for preserving barren farmland and derelict car parks instead of building new homes?
This was a strategy we are familiar with in general elections: grassroots vote.
The first major poll of the leadership campaign dropped the previous week and showed Liz Truss dominating the race. Days later, Barbour was out in full force.
Although Sunak managed to narrow the poll gap between himself and Truss, he still lost the leadership election decisively. He didn’t get his chance at No 10 until the Truss premiership collapsed and his warnings about Sunak’s borrow-and-spend agenda were quickly and spectacularly proven correct.
So have the last 20 months reflected the real Rishi Sunak? Has he become the classical liberal and fiscal hawk he established in the Treasury?
He sidestepped the housing issue during the leadership race, meaning there was little he could do to signal any sort of housing building initiative once he took over. Rather, he was forced to scrap his housing goals because the Nimbys in his own party managed to force his hand.
So what will happen to inflation, the biggest domestic crisis of the last three years? Sunak knew better than anyone that this was a phenomenon largely outside any government’s ability to control. After all, he was one of the few people able to predict a price spiral in the UK, using his March 2021 budget to protect the public finances from what was about to take a hit.
Yet he spent his time at No 10 banking on the idea that falling inflation could be attributed to measures taken by his government; which never led to a jump in the polls. This week’s news that inflation returned to its target in May should have been a crowd-raising moment. But it’s been pretty quiet, as people continue to feel the effects of slowing price increases.
This government has been given no love for its handling of the inflation crisis – but neither should there be. Sunak knew full well that he had no control over the Treasury (this is a matter for the Bank of England). The most it could do was mitigate the consequences of high borrowing costs.
Of course, there are some policies that are harder to talk about when you hold the top office, and become even harder in an election year. For example, realistically no one would expect the Conservative Party to lift the triple lock on state pensions this close to the election.
So how did Sunak become the politician who proposed the “triple lock plus”, where the tax threshold is raised for pensioners but not for workers? This is the same man who, when chancellor, spearheaded reform of the triple lock during Covid: he and other Conservatives thought it was an opportunity to address its costs but also intergenerational injustice.
Just as Barbour did not sit well with voters in the summer of 2022, many of Sunak’s current policies do not sit well now. Part of the problem is that much of what has been done in the last 20 months has been exaggerated: They are not “cutting taxes” as the Conservatives insist, but they are increasing the burden to a near-record level.
Cuts to National Insurance – a tax that Sunak tried to increase as chancellor, then focused on cuts as prime minister – account for just a quarter of the cash raised by freezing tax thresholds.
But this broader attempt to say what this government thinks voters want to hear explains the strange mix of proposals contained in the Tory manifesto. From National Service to a hard cap on immigration figures, these are not policies that seem unique to the Prime Minister.
The irony of all this is that if Sunak is clearly passionate about what he stands for, the public tends to respond positively to him. The only time the polls began to shift during his premiership was when he delayed several net zero targets for cars and heat pumps. It wasn’t the easiest argument to make, but the Prime Minister was in his own business tackling the cost of living crisis and the public seemed to understand that.
Even during this week’s BBC Question Time special, the only applause Sunak received came after the Prime Minister’s usually outspoken comments. “I was right,” he said without hesitation about his decision to oppose Truss’ spending plans. “What Keir Starmer promises you is the same fantasy Liz Truss did.”
Some fund managers suggest Labor will have a freer hand on borrowing than thought: a remarkable claim given the latest debt projections, which show net debt topping £3 trillion by the end of the next parliament. Sunak knows from experience which way this will go. Although unpopular, attempting to warn against such things is when it performs best and gets the best response.
There are uncanny parallels between the 2022 leadership election and this general election. If the polls are correct, Sunak will lose again. And unless the next government unveils a magic money tree, its warnings about what will happen next will again prove wise.
It is a matter of curiosity why Prime Minister Sunak did not allow these predictions to come to the fore a little more during his term as prime minister. Maybe it could have led to different results.
Kate Andrews is Economics Editor at The Spectator