Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are cut from the same cloth, which bodes ill for Rishi

Philip Collins
Philip Collins
Daniel Hambury
WEST END FINAL

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You can always tell that politics is about to enter a new phase because suddenly the Prime Minister makes himself available for a Sunday morning interview. Rishi Sunak must have hoped that a new year would bring with it a new start. New year begins, for all of us, with the illusion that everything can change. Eventually though, and no matter what the Prime Minister says, the hard facts will assert themselves.

Next week, the country will be once again plunged into industrial action that the Government appears powerless to prevent. The sense of a country not working is palpable. Inflation remains drastically high and household incomes consequently fragile. Exports have collapsed because of the unmentionable madcap adventure of Brexit. Crime is high and anti-social behaviour is a big problem again. There are queues of ambulances outside hospitals waiting for a slot in A&E. These are not the conditions in which a government can thrive. The Conservative party has been in power since 2010 and, eventually, an electorate blames the Government for the mess they see around them, which is why the herald of a new year has done nothing to dent Labour’s solid opinion poll lead.

Set on this sea of troubles, it is not surprising that Sunak is struggling to steer a steady course. The brutal facts are hurting him although, as usual, too much of the commentary focuses on his style, as if by speaking differently he could magically conjure better background conditions.

It is certainly true that Sunak speaks in a manner that recalls a training exercise for the new middle management tier at a paper company; “and the change we need is to put innovation at the heart of everything we do”. Nobody outside a business seminar has ever talked about their priorities being in a few different “buckets” and calling for a “change of mindset” is the point where business blah meets self-help banality.

However, presenting himself as the calm chief executive who might make the world marginally better is the best plan available to Sunak. His new year address was therefore a perfectly sensible piece of political positioning. He tried, as best he could, to define the terms by which he would like to be judged — halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut waiting times and stop the migrant boats. Of these five targets only the last one will really bite. Inflation will likely fall anyway, the economy is predicted to grow which will, in turn, have the effect of reducing debt. Merely “cutting” waiting times, with no number attached, is not an ambitious target. The big question here is migration on which it is not obvious Sunak has anything practical to offer.

Keir Starmer’s new year address was less different from this than either man would like us to think. The two men do come from rival political heritages. When he delivered the Mais lecture as Chancellor of the Exchequer last February, Sunak delivered an address so dry that Margaret Thatcher would have asked for a drink. In so far as Starmer had any clear politics, they came from the soft Left of the Labour party.

Yet the truth is that both men wear these beliefs rather lightly. Both came relatively late to politics and sometimes it shows. There has been no previous occasion in living memory when both party leaders were such political novices. Hence, the battle tends to descend from the ideological heights into platitudes about competence.

Either of the two men could have said “We’re going to roll up our sleeves, fix the problems and improve our country”. In fact it was Starmer. Innovation,

ill-defined and abstract is a tagline for them both.

Sunak wants the UK to be “a beacon of science, technology and enterprise” while Starmer, hardly by way of contrast, talked about “competitive growth clusters in high-value industries”.

In practice Sunak and Starmer are both leaders who will be defined by the way that they tackle a problem rather than by ideological fervour. They come at things from different directions, but they would arrive at the same point more often than we might expect.

That’s not to say there isn’t a massive and important difference between the two of them because there is. The big difference is that Sunak is, sad to say for him, the leader of the Government and Starmer is his challenger. And if the electorate judges that it is time for a change, as it appears they will, there is not a lot that Sunak will be able to say to that.

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