Tax slip-ups plus all too casual approach equal trouble for ex-chancellor’s leadership hopes
As polls continue to point to a Truss victory, where is it all going wrong for the Tories’ former golden boy?
For a man whose campaign was built on the inevitability of victory, Rishi Sunak could hardly be further from his goal. Three weeks into the Conservative leadership race, polling suggests his opponent Liz Truss is nearly out of sight.
His team unquestionably overestimated his popularity with party members and underestimated Ms Truss. The former chancellor could yet turn the tables, though even his supporters think it unlikely, barring a misstep by the Foreign Secretary.
Seasoned political campaigners say there are many reasons why the Sunak campaign has been a flop – and they were obvious from the start.
Some believe his campaign was always going to be dead on arrival thanks to his recent track record in government and his back-stabbing of the Prime Minister. Others think he could have been ahead by now if he had “got his messaging right”.
All agree that his about-turn on VAT cuts this week was a sign of panic, and might have snuffed out the sputtering candle of his leadership bid.
“Quite simply, he is fighting the wrong election,” said one veteran of multiple Tory leadership campaigns. “You only ever deal with the electorate that is in front of you, not the next one. They are running the campaign as if they are fighting a general election, but they have to win this one first.”
Even the fact that Mr Sunak chose not to wear a tie for TV debates has been seen as a sign that he was trying to appeal to the general public, rather than Tory members, who prefer their leaders more buttoned-up.
Accusations that Team Sunak does not understand the Tory membership crop up over and over again among MPS and strategists. Some blame Liam Booth-smith, his former chief of staff at the Treasury and keystone of his campaign team, for failing to make sure his boss is fully connected with members’ views. Others blame his campaign manager Mel Stride MP. Many blame Sunak himself.
“He has a very safe seat in Yorkshire where he can have barbecues for friendly Tory types in the garden of his mansion,” said one MP. “He hasn’t spent enough time going up and down the country finding out what members really think.”
Another catastrophic miscalculation by the Sunak campaign has been the backlash against him for his pivotal role in bringing down Boris Johnson.
“Rishi and his team seemed to think he would be hailed a hero for resigning and getting rid of Boris,” said another Tory MP. “They thought Liz Truss would be tainted by standing by Boris. But the membership hates backstabbers, as Michael Gove found out. Truss made the right decision to stay on, because a lot of the members still prefer Boris to either of them.”
Whether Mr Sunak could have done any better is open to debate. Those who have flocked to Ms Truss’s side believe his campaign was doomed from the start because of his high-tax policies as chancellor, but there are impartial observers who believe he could have been in pole position now.
“He had the best-prepared campaign and his team have been tooling up for months,” said one strategist. “They had a big head start, but if you have the wrong message it doesn’t matter how slick your campaign might be.
‘It’s probably the first time in his life he has had to confront the possibility of failure. It will take him a long time to get over it if he loses’
“Their message was: you might not love my economics but it’s successful so stick with me and we will be OK.
“Instead, they should have been selling the fact that he has promised tax cuts before the next election, that he is the one who spent £37billion on handouts to help with energy bills, and that there would be more to come.”
Those looking from the outside in are also baffled by Mr Sunak’s decision earlier this week to promise to scrap VAT on energy bills for a year if he became PM – something he personally opposed when it was suggested by Mr Johnson earlier this year.
“If you ask anyone who has run a successful political campaign they will tell you that you never deviate from the core message,” said the strategist. “Dominic Cummings knows that, Alastair Campbell knows that. You set out your stall and you stick to it.
“Attacking Liz on the numbers could have cut through, they should have gone out every day and said her numbers don’t add up, they should have hammered away at it relentlessly and made people doubt her credibility.
“But they have lost their nerve in a big way by saying they might cut VAT.
At the start of the campaign members of Mr Sunak’s team told The Daily Telegraph that they wanted to create an inevitability about his victory. That, too, has backfired.
“There is an arrogance that he would glide through,” said one Whitehall source. “Members pick up on that. The fact that the campaign website was registered in December, all that putting his signature on stuff, it annoyed a lot of people.”
Mr Sunak’s social media campaign is the remit of Cass Horowitz, the 31-year-old son of author Anthony, who is credited with polishing up Mr Sunak’s image as chancellor and producing his slick campaign video.
“The slickness is a problem,” said one source who backed one of the unsuccessful candidates in the earlier rounds. “If you’re spending all your time worrying about camera angles and faffing around on Instagram you’re not focusing on the important stuff.”
One of the key planks of the “inevitability of success” strategy was to get more than half of Tory MPS to publicly back Mr Sunak, proving to members that he could unite the party.
With three former chief whips on board – Gavin Williamson, Mark Harper and Mark Spencer – Mr Sunak expected around 130 MPS would back him in the first round, but he only managed to get to 137 when only three candidates remained, meaning fewer than four in ten MPS were on his side.
Some MPS believe the figure would have been even lower, and that he might not have made it to the final two, had it not been for Mr Williamson “working his magic and convincing a lot of MPS the Rishi train was unstoppable”, meaning they needed to back him if they wanted jobs in a future government.
Many MPS are undeclared, but increasing numbers of them, including Ben Wallace, are now backing Ms Truss, because she has the momentum and they are convinced she will win.
A lack of humility has also characterised the Sunak campaign: “A lot of his advisors still see him as the golden boy who did furlough and was the most popular member of the government,” said a Whitehall source.
“Some of the people around him can’t see anything other than ‘he’s great’, which is why they came up with that ‘Ready for Rishi’ slogan. What does that even mean? It suggests that people need to get ready for him as PM because he’s already won, and people don’t like that sense of entitlement.”
Mr Sunak lost the support of some Tory members by interrupting Ms Truss 22 times in 12 minutes during the BBC head-to-head hustings event – a trait that should have been ironed out during exhaustive rehearsal sessions.
One Tory source who knows him well said: “He is a calm and smiling character on the outside but there is an angry and arrogant man waiting to break out, and we saw flashes of that in the TV debate.
“Liz has been around longer, she has been the butt of jokes, she has been the punchline on Have I Got News For You, and she has developed a thicker skin.”
Mr Sunak, of course, was once hailed as the new face of the Right by none other than Liz Truss. He has now veered so much to the centre that he has been compared to a socialist. Tory members could be forgiven for wondering who is the real Rishi Sunak.
“I think his Right-wing credentials were always exaggerated,” said one minister who has worked with him. “He is ultimately very much an Establishment figure. He supported Brexit but then did nothing about it. It was a play for the Right rather than something he wanted to go up and down the country championing.
Others say Mr Sunak was ensnared by the dreaded “Treasury orthodoxy” in his three years as chief secretary to the Treasury and then chancellor.
“Very few chancellors are able to stand up to Treasury orthodoxy,” said a senior Conservative source. “Most chancellors go along with it and that is the trap that Rishi Sunak fell into. That’s why he reversed the corporation tax cut. It damaged his reputation with the Right, who thought he might as well be the permanent secretary of the Treasury as chancellor. I’m not sure he was ever going to recover from that.”
It is striking that most of his campaign team worked with him in the Treasury and his campaign manager Mel Stride is a former Treasury minister, giving them a somewhat narrow world view.
“Rishi is a banker and a former chancellor surrounded by Treasury people, whereas Liz is a pure politician,” said the PR strategist.
“Rishi will look at data and decide that people are still able to pay their bills so he doesn’t need to take more action, whereas Liz understands that it’s not just about numbers, it’s about how people feel. Boris understands that, Blair understood it, but Rishi doesn’t seem to.
“People who can still pay their bills and have enough money left to go on holiday might not be struggling, but they are worried about what’s coming and Liz understands that. It affects confidence, and if you can restore confidence that goes a long way. A spreadsheet doesn’t tell you that.”
For now, Mr Sunak needs to hope he can keep the gap small enough that he can take advantage if Ms Truss falters.
“This is probably the first time in his life he has had to confront the possibility of failure,” said one former colleague. “It will take him a long time to get over it if he loses.”