No one goes into politics — with its endless door-knocking and having to be nice to voters all the time — to be lobby fodder. Most MPs, on both sides of the house — including Liberal Democrats — want to be prime minister. Of course, only a tiny minority succeed.
Even being leader of the opposition confers few guarantees. Of the 15 permanent opposition leaders since 1945, six have gone on to be prime minister and only two since 1980.
So it pays to already be in government. Chancellor Rishi Sunak finds himself well-placed in that regard. He is popular, too. According to YouGov, Sunak enjoys a net approval of 8 per cent, compared with Boris Johnson’s minus 51.
Yet Sunak will be aware that few occupants of No 11 manage the move next door. Since the war, a measly four of 24 chancellors have achieved it. And the comparison with the last to do so is instructive.As late as 2005, Gordon Brown enjoyed a satisfaction rating in the mid-60s. Yet his premiership was crisis-ridden and brief.
Brown himself was fond of saying that there are two kinds of chancellor, “those who fail and those who get out in time”. He escaped, finally making it to No 10 after a decade, but it was his decisions in the Treasury that defined his time as PM. In his final budget, Brown cut the basic rate of income tax from 22p to 20p, funded by the abolition of the 10p rate. What was initially lauded as a masterstroke became an albatross around his neck.
Should Sunak find himself in No 10, he too would face the consequences of his chancellorship. Take the decision to provide a £200 loan for household energy bills, funded by an effective £40 a year flat tax over the next five years. At a time when inflation is biting, interest rates rising and the economic recovery stalling, it is riven with risk.
Boris Johnson cannot be written off. But the ghost of chancellors-turned-prime minister past is a reminder that ambitious politicians, like golfers, must play the short and the long game well.Leaders of the opposition who win elections at least come to power with clean slates and clear mandates. Chancellors, arriving at the fag end of a long period in office, enjoy no such advantage.
