Rishi Sunak is teetering on the brink as the Tories face oblivion

Only by fully grasping our economic ails can the Prime Minister escape his catastrophic predicament

Make no mistake: we have just entered the endgame in the Tories’ 13-year reign. True, Labour’s gains in recent local elections were threatening rather than thunderous. In the Labour camp, there are murmurs about whether Keir Starmer is leading the party towards a limp majority. Nor did the apocalypse quite arrive for the Tories.

But the more one splices it, the more it looks as if Rishi Sunak is doomed. It is telling that the PM’S next move has been to pledge fresh GP funding instead of, say, announcing new details in his policy to stop illegal Channel crossings. It is not simply that Sunak is teetering on the edge of a trap as he desperately scrambles around for a countryunifying narrative (after all, when British politics descends into an auction over NHS funding, Labour will always have the edge). Even more ominously, the PM’S meticulous “Third Way” strategy seems to have collapsed.

Until now, he has sought to be all things to all people – keeping cashstrapped Red Wall voters on the hook with “red meat” on small boats while courting liberal Tories with solemn talk of fiscal rectitude. Such an approach was always cynical. It now looks unsalvageable.

The PM is trapped in a zero-sum game where any attempt to court one group of voters with a targeted gesture risks alienating the other. Sending asylum seekers off to central Africa may prove roaringly popular in the Red Wall, but the prospect is unleashing paroxysms of disgust at the dinner parties of home-working centre-right professionals. A new round of flashy net zero projects may help the likes of Dominic Raab cling on in Surrey’s virtuous millionaire enclaves, but Workington Man can only bristle with indignation at Whitehall’s breathy utopianism as he struggles to feed the gas meter.

In other words, the Tories are now collapsing on all fronts. Their shortlived dominance in the Red Wall is evaporating. Even more portentous is the resurrection of the Liberal Democrats. Ed Davey’s efforts to breach the “Blue Wall” with a strange brew of NHS activism, Nimbyism and carefully crafted attack ads on stealth taxes, is paying off. Equally disquieting is the thought that a second Brexit referendum could be the price of support in a coalition with Labour. The third party knows too well that the Remainer South’s nettling exasperation with Brexit has not abated.

But it gets even worse for the Tories; lurking beneath an increasingly bleak electoral calculus is an alarming historical trend. That is the strange death of Thatcherite England. It is striking that even in Tory swing seats in the South, the NHS was the biggest issue coming up on the doorstep at the local elections. There is a new generation of Tory voters that expects both lower taxes and a well-functioning health service. Three generations on from the Second World War, the welfare state’s entrenchment as a suite of basic entitlements for all citizens rather than a safety net for the most vulnerable seems complete.

The fading of Thatcherite England’s animal spirits is also unmistakable, even if it is only the Lib Dems who appear fully in tune with this trend. As asset values climb in an era of wage stagnation, small-c conservatives don’t hesitate to thwart developments that threaten the value of their nest eggs.

A middle class that once yearned for the individualistic freedom of running a family business is embracing the “liberating” solitude of working from home. While Thatcher’s cleansing anti-socialism may have electrified an earlier generation, the purifying radicalism of net zero has captivated today’s centre-right millennials. Of course, the basic problem is that pandering to this voter group means anti-growth policies – and these ultimately threaten to demolish the property-owning democracy upon which Tory support is based.

Given Rishi Sunak’s dire predicament, and the wider existential crisis that looms for the Right, it is no surprise that the Tory party is already debating which way to go next. One group advocates a return to the Cameroonian pre-brexit playbook. But this risks fomenting a Ukip-style revolt from its most loyal voters, who may not tolerate being neglected for another electoral cycle. It also does not address the long-term insanity of giving in to an anti-growth status quo that ultimately threatens its very existence.

Another branch of the party – which intriguingly includes several Trussites – wants to import the statist, antiimmigration, anti-woke American Natcon movement across the pond.

But, in the end, all roads lead back to the economy. If the Tories wish to be in power again, they need a viable plan for turbo-boosting growth. This may not be as impossible as it sounds: after all, we pulled it off during the Industrial Revolution. Then, however, the country was blessed with abundant cheap energy and an energetic culture of progress. If we are to have any hope of pulling off a similar feat during the information age, the Right needs an ambitious but sensible alternative energy transition plan to net zero. It also needs to try to coax Middle England from its anti-progressive bunker, with a concrete vision of the future – one that has creative freedom and agency, rather than climate doom or dismal AI, at its centre.

That means getting to grips with the country’s core dilemma. What the PM seems strangely unable to articulate is that the British economy is struggling to transition from one driven by mass production to one driven by mass creativity. This goes a long way in explaining why wages have been flat for almost 15 years, and why so many businesses, in their inability to innovate, remain addicted to cheap labour. While productivity in the likes of manufacturing falters, innovation in tech, the creative industries and the wider service sector seems underwhelming. This is partly because the West, for all its liberalism, is more accustomed to producing corporate cogs in the machine than free-thinking individuals, and partly because the operation of the embryonic “knowledge economy” appears to be dominated by a clique of big global firms, with the majority of the labour force excluded.

The only way back for Sunak – and indeed the entire Tory movement – is to grasp this civilisational challenge, communicate it powerfully to voters and ask them for a mandate to tackle it head on. If not, the Right faces a generation in the wilderness. Let’s not hold our breath.

Pandering to today’s centreright millennials means anti-growth policies