Rishi Sunak barely took much time to relax over Christmas. He was back at his desk in Downing Street when most people were still trying to work out what day of the week it was. The prime minister is well known for believing hard work will get you what you want. But even if he had worked nonstop through the festive period, he would have got no closer to solving the fundamental dilemma he faces next year.
Early or late? Sunak hasn’t made his mind up whether to hold the general election in May or the autumn, with his senior aides sitting on different horns of the dilemma. Conservative Campaign Headquarters is working on the assumption that the election could be at any point, but many MPs assume he will go early: one sent me his diary, which runs from the 6 March budget as the starting gun for a campaign that culminates on 2 May. The second week of May is ominously blocked off as “election recovery”.
If Sunak did decide to go to the polls in May, it would mean that election recovery would be for MPs (or, at that point, many ex-MPs) and councillors too. Tory England is also up for election in May, with councillors in 107 local authorities going to the polls. Those councillors will be more motivated to go out and save their own bacon as well as that of their local MPs: if they lose their seats, they may still be licking their wounds come an autumn polling day. The party machine is pretty demoralised and understaffed, but if the campaigning engines in constituencies are recovering from big local council losses, they may find it even harder to get enough canvassers to fight the ground war. One benefit of so many Tory MPs standing down at this election rather than lose their seat is that their replacement candidates aren’t cynical and mentally checked out in the way someone merely going through the motions of losing a seat would be. But new candidates rely even more on their local parties to do the campaigning: and that assumes a local party is in good shape.
The budget-as-starting-gun theory relies largely on that fiscal event going well. They don’t always – and that would be particularly damaging for a Conservative party trying to recover from one of the most infamous examples of a budget backfiring: Liz Truss’s mini-budget of 2022. The Conservative party used to taunt Labour for “blowing up the economy”, but voters are more likely to remember what happened to their mortgages in the past few years than anything Gordon Brown got up to 14 years ago. So even a big giveaway budget which cuts income tax, national insurance and does something eyecatching on inheritance tax has big risks: if it isn’t accompanied by an explanation of how the Conservatives would pay for these policies, then voters might be forgiven for wondering whether the party is being fiscally reckless to try to win an election.
Paying for tax cuts would involve squeezing departmental spending even more. No party wants to go into an election with a plan for spending cuts, even less now when voter satisfaction with public services, including the ever-salient NHS, is so low. When he was health secretary, Jeremy Hunt used to argue to cabinet meetings that even Conservative voters were happy to pay higher taxes if they could trust that the NHS would look after them properly when they were ill and that they’d have a secure retirement. They may not be as grateful for tax cuts as many Conservative MPs think they will be.
Some Tories think they could use the prospect of spending cuts to make Labour’s life uncomfortable. But the opposition is now much more at ease with talking about running the country without much money. Labour’s sketchy readiness for government in the middle of 2024 is something that some in Whitehall think means Sunak should go early to expose Starmer and ensure the party’s tenure in power ends up being short enough for the Tories to take a sabbatical in opposition, then return pretty quickly. This is the sort of thing that parties that have been in government for a very long time end up thinking, though: they forget how ill-prepared they were when they came into power. New Labour hadn’t thought through every policy area in 1997, while David Cameron had some charmingly naive ideas about how government worked when he entered Downing Street in 2010.
So even if the tax cuts they’ve been agitating for over the past year do turn up in March, Tory MPs are anxious about the budget kicking things off. “Let’s hope this starting gun doesn’t have duds like the party conference and the king’s speech,” says one junior minister. That party conference speech, at the time written up as “bold”, given it rejected 30 years of political consensus, is largely regarded as a misstep, even by Sunak’s supporters. One senior Conservative says: “We need to talk more about what has happened in the last 13 years. But Rishi’s own conference speech didn’t help by attacking the last 30 years.” What also doesn’t help is there are only a handful of policies that Tories feel they can sincerely boast about: school reform, universal credit, getting Brexit done, and more recently, halving inflation.
Sunak’s more recent refrain is “finish the job”: something he said repeatedly in his press conference about the Rwanda policy. Some of his aides think “finish the job” would be better in May when there is still a chance that things could get worse, than in autumn when the job looks so messy that voters might conclude it’s worth abandoning. If Rwanda is still a prospect rather than a reality, at least the Conservatives can blame others for blocking it, rather than face up to the possibility that it doesn’t work. Then again, others think May means he doesn’t have enough time to come up with evidence of things he can sell to the electorate.
There are a lot of “then agains” in the prime minister’s mind at the moment. Another is that leaving more time makes him look feart: allowing speculation about a spring election to build, then not doing anything would give him a Brown problem of appearing to run away from the electorate at the last minute.
Of course, Theresa May can give Sunak some advice on the downsides of going for an election at the wrong time, but this is different: she was calling an election for no reason other than she wanted one. Sunak doesn’t want one: for all his party management problems with his hollow majority at the moment, even a shock win would leave him in a worse position.
Those party management problems mean Sunak can’t take a lot of the big decisions he really needed to in order to have meaningful reform to show the electorate. But they will be a nightmare whenever the election campaign starts. Whether Sunak goes for “finish the job” or some other slogan, he can’t be sure that his troops will actually echo it. They’re not in a loyal mood. They don’t know what their party stands for, and are all offering their own versions of Toryism: just look at the storm over James Daly’s ill-disciplined comments about “crap parenting” this week. Everyone says daft things when they’ve relaxed in an interview: but MPs who are part of a serious election-winning machine don’t relax.
Even if Sunak manages to avoid similar “bigoted woman” moments on the campaign trail proper, he knows there will be plenty of senior Conservatives who are sounding off about his policies and publicly pushing him to go further. Half of the party is already thinking about the leadership election after a polling day defeat, and will be campaigning more vigorously for their pitch to take over the party in that “election recovery” period than they will be for their current chief. Many will want to make pronouncements during the campaign so that they can say “I told you so” afterwards. Many of their colleagues will amplify those pronouncements.
Sunak will have to embrace a noisy, ill-disciplined campaign as there is little chance of him getting anything else. He has seen the virtues of this to some extent, concluding after his party held Uxbridge in July that niche campaigns on local issues could allow the Conservatives to stem losses in other areas too. But he will probably get frustrated by the sense that while he is working relentlessly, his party won’t be beavering away in the same way.
• Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of the Spectator
• This article was amended on 31 December 2023. The Uxbridge byelection was held in July rather than in “autumn”.
