He’s teetotal, tidy, smart-looking. He brushes his hair and smiles engagingly. He’s articulate and coherent. With a successful highly lucrative City career behind him and a blameless private life, he has no obvious faults: no sackings or embarrassing public apologies, at least. A perfect ethnic minority blend of William Hague and David Cameron, even down to being MP for the former’s constituency, its name and location combining the best of North and South. Honestly, a novelist couldn’t better it. And he drinks tea – from God’s Own Country! What more could anyone want?

Yes – Rishi Sunak seems to be an answer to the Tory party’s current prolonged nightmare. A capable Chancellor whose furlough scheme was, if a little slow off the ground, instrumental in helping many through the pandemic, now deftly distancing himself from the latest smeary emanations swirling from No 10.

But but …is he really the answer? A closer look may be wise.

Why? One word: Fairness.

This is probably the single biggest issue in politics and has been since the financial crisis over a decade ago. An apparently successful economic settlement imploded under its own contradictions. Britain (and, to be fair, much of the Western world) has yet to find a new one. Central to it is fairness. Fairness in deciding what sort of economy we should have and how to grow it, especially given today’s challenges (technology and climate change, as Blair has shrewdly pointed out). Fairness in how its benefits should be shared. Fairness across classes, generations and regions. Above all, fairness in how its costs and burdens are shared.

It was a sense that there was no such fairness – especially in relation to the costs – that it wasn’t even a question to be asked – let alone thought about and answers attempted – that lay in part behind Brexit, behind Mrs May’s attempts to do something about the “Just about managing” (remember them?), behind Corbyn’s focus on the “many not the few” and even behind Johnson’s Levelling Up promises. (That sense of unfairness is also at the heart of the anger about the No 10 parties and other rule-breaking.) That these political changes and promises have not provided answers or have not even been attempted or were pushed by politicians distracted by other priorities (May) or lacking credibility for other reasons (Corbyn) should not distract from the fact that answers are still needed. Does Sunak have them? Does he even understand the need for them? It is not obvious that he does.

Consider:

• His default instincts are not always good. His first response to the pandemic was to offer loans to businesses unable to earn an income. It was only when the wrong-headedness of this was pointed out that he swiftly changed course.
• He appears to be making the same mistake now – with loans to all to pay for higher energy costs, loans which will be hard to repay if energy costs remain or go higher and incomes remain static or decrease, both of which seem highly likely.
• Why is the benefits system not being used to help the poorest, those hardest hit by high energy prices? That is what it is there for and it will help those not helped by Sunak’s existing proposals – renters, for instance. Is there some ideological opposition to doing so? If not, why is it being ignored?
• Tax or rather NI. No-one doubts the need to pay for the NHS or social care. But why is that cost being loaded on only one tax, paid by those in employment, but not on those with an income from other sources, let alone with other assets and wealth?
• Contrast this with the rush to grant eye-wateringly lucrative contracts to businesses, many of them barely in existence, with little due diligence, many to VIPs, friends and acquaintances of the Tory party at the start of the pandemic. We can all understand the need for urgency and the inevitability of paying over the odds. But writing off fraudulent loans, or not making any attempt to recover payments made from those who did not deliver or delivered poor quality gives the impression that the rich can get away with behaviour which would be diligently pursued if done by the poor. It reinforces an impression that we are not, to coin a phrase used by another clever Tory Chancellor, “in this together“. Laughing in Parliament when the Opposition points out the financial difficulties of the poor, as the photo above of this week’s debate following his energy announcements shows, is not the best look.
• VAT on energy: its removal was a promise made by Brexiteers – something the UK could do when out. And yet, now when this might actually help and when countries within the EU are doing so (Belgium, Poland Spain), nothing is being done. Why spurn one of Brexit’s freedoms?
• Ah – but there are some Brexit freedoms Sunak is keen on. He is apparently promising a “bonfire” (one political cliche which certainly deserves its own bonfire) of City regulations. Oh dear. As if that didn’t cause problems last time it was tried. 80% of all the lobby groups and people Sunak has met in the last few months have been banks and financial firms. Hmm …. fine for a City Minister but a Chancellor should be thinking about the economy beyond financial services. This is not the 1980’s after all.

Or maybe that is what he does want to recreate. What does Sunak really believe? What sort of economy? What sort of society? Is he just promising a reheated version of Thatcherism: austerity, tax cuts, deregulation. If not that, what? Of course, a Cabinet Minister is limited in what he can say, though it is hard to see that the PM would have noticed if Sunak had gone off piste on actual policy.

But if Tory MPs ever decide to sack Johnson, the question for them is not whether Sunak will be a much better Tory leader and PM than Boris. For pretty much any credible challenger that almost goes without saying. Nor is it whether he will be attractive to party members and Tory voters. Rather it is what plans, what ideas, what vision he has for the sort of country and economy Britain should be? And whether such a vision attempts to provide answers to the challenges Britain faces in the decades to come.

Cyclefree