The Chancellor’s New Clothes: Is Sunak’s Popularity Faltering After an Underwhelming Spring Statement?
During 2020 and much of 2021, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Rishi Sunak had seemed the perfect chancellor for a Conservative government focused on a post-austerity ‘levelling-up’ project. He had overseen a successful furlough scheme, generous fiscal support for business, and a widely popular ‘eat-out-to-help-out’ initiative. Sunak at this point had an untarnished political career, free of the baggage of the likes of Johnson or Patel, and his repeatedly successful policy record placed him as the frontrunner to succeed the prime minister. Where did it go wrong?
Sunak’s popularity took a definitive blow in the wake of the decision in the October 2021 budget to cut the £20 bonus to Universal Credit (UC) payments that had been introduced as a lifeline during the pandemic.
The height of Sunak’s popularity had been May 2020, where 53% of YouGov respondents stated that he was doing a ‘good job’ as Chancellor. At this stage, only 9% of respondents believed the largely untested Chancellor had done a ‘bad job,’ his experience thus far existing in the anomaly of the pandemic, where his prescriptions for the economic symptoms of Covid broadly aligned with those taken throughout Western Europe.
Sunak’s popularity steadily declined from this point, with ‘eat-out-to-help-out’ and the extension of furlough providing the only bumps in his popularity after its May 2021 apex. After the October UC cut, 31% of respondents stated that he was doing a ‘good job,’ with a simultaneously noticeable increase in respondents saying he had done a ‘bad job’ (26%).
It would seem that Sunak’s popularity had rested on his peculiar role as a high-spending Tory chancellor. After a decade of austerity and ‘balancing the budget,’ Sunak had been forced to engage in a massive expansion of state intervention in order to fund the bare necessities of much of the UK’s lower classes. The UC increase achieved this, furlough provided supplementation, and various targeted welfare schemes during the duration of the pandemic garnished it.
The state of affairs now that Covid has been blunted in its political and economic lethality allowed for this seeming anachronism to be discarded; the UC cut was the first sign of this U-turn. Sunak has discarded his red mask of social democracy and adorned his new clothes: the Tory robe of royal blue neoliberalism. The public, suffering what the OBR calls the ‘worst drop in living standards in 70 years’; and increasingly aware of the contradictions of its political class à la ‘partygate,’ have withdrawn its olive branch to Sunak.
This story does not end with the UC cut. Whilst Boris Johnson’s government was embroiled in the ‘partygate’ scandal, prospective candidates to succeed (or usurp) the prime minister began laying the foundations for a Conservative leadership battle. International circumstances have distracted from this endeavour, and this was seemingly reflected in Sunak’s opening to the Spring Statement 2022.
Sunak described the UK’s economic sanctions on Russia in tandem with its military support for Ukraine as ‘not cost-free for us,’ perhaps setting the stage for an electoral strategy designed to attribute part of the cost of living crisis on external circumstances outside of Rishi’s control. With this pretext over, Sunak revealed the reality of the UK’s economic paradigm: a slowdown in economic growth, inflation in excess of twice the government's pre-pandemic target (at 7.4% and 3% respectively). His prescriptions for this ailment included an income tax decrease of 1%, a 5p fuel duty cut, and an increase in the National Insurance payment threshold to £12,750.
These measures lack the illusory ambition of the extreme measures that Covid required, and that painted the initial picture of a post-austerity Tory chancellor. Continuing on from the October cut of UC, Sunak’s Spring Statement showed that the ‘levelling-up’ agenda seems to have been forgotten amidst the chaos of the last 2 years. This is in addition to a statement devoid of any commitment to the 2050 net-zero target outside of a 5% VAT cut on solar panels. The cost of living crisis continues, and is set to worsen over the year, with a particular crunch in autumn as energy price caps rise once more.
Sunak’s popularity as of April 2022 has never been lower. In addition to an underwhelming budget, his wife’s ties to Infosys, a firm continuing to operate from Russia, and a £100,000 donation to Winchester College, an elite private school, have generated a perception of the current richest MP as out of touch and insincere. 27% believe he has done a ‘good job’ as chancellor. 33% of respondents believe he has done a ‘bad job’ as chancellor. It is safe to say that the general public believes his platform to be inadequate to meet the challenges of the day.
Betting sites still punt Sunak as the frontrunner to replace the embattled Boris, with his odds to be the next Conservative leader on Betfair standing at 5.8; the closest challenger being Lizz Truss at 8 (using decimal odds). However, it is now Keir Starmer who Betfair considers the most likely to be the next prime minister with odds of 5/1 compared to Sunak’s 7/1. The fog of war hanging over the political environment assures that it would be foolish to draw any real conclusions on the next election at this point. Nonetheless, Sunak (and the Conservatives generally) has suffered a fall from grace since their landslide win in the 2019 general election.
by Harry Fuller