Sunak must go – a new leader is the only chance of avoiding extinction

You know that things are bad when the only viable option is as superlatively deranged as it is logically unavoidable.
And yet, such is the predicament of the Tories. The very idea that the party could jettison its leader – the fourth in five years – mere months before an election seems beyond bonkers. Under Rishi Sunak, the Tories are merely disdained as chronically inept; another leadership psychodrama could see them spurned as clinically unstable. But if the party is to stave off an extinction-level event, sacking Rishi Sunak is precisely what MPs must do.

As the PM’s enemies plot, Downing Street is desperately spinning a story of light at the end of the tunnel. No 10 remains on track to launch its flagship Rwanda policy before the election. The economy is turning around. Sunak will soon be able to claim that the recession is thwarted, inflation beaten and interest rates are on a downward trend. 

The theory goes that if only restive Tories would hold their nerve, their leader can regain his footing. In contrast, they argue, the Reform threat is built on sand. With the latter unlikely to win a single seat at the next election, the Tory machine can yet comfortably crush it with the charge that a vote for Richard Tice is a vote for Keir Starmer.

This view is tempting but wrong. No 10 clings to its Rwanda policy as a totem that can yet shield it from colossal defeat. But after being mauled by the Lords, bashed by Right-wingers and ensnared by endless operational challenges, it is a tarnished relic, hollowed of its power. Only one per cent of voters still believe the policy will stop the boats. 

Nor will a slight shift in the economic outlook be enough to convince the public that the country has turned a corner. Wage increases are too concentrated in industries like hospitality to deliver wide dividends. The job market remains frustratingly cool, as the number of permanent, decently waged jobs in Red Wall seats continues to fall. 

The middle class is unlikely to be humbled with gratitude at falling inflation. While grocery bills may soon drop, there will be no drastic reversal in the cost of little luxuries, from restaurant outings to manicures.

Sunak’s belief that he can crush the Reform threat with conventional messaging is born of wishful thinking. The argument that a protest vote is an enemy vote did neutralise the Brexit Party at a time when Leave voters were loath to let in a Remain Labour government headed by Jeremy Corbyn. 

But the Left no longer inspires such fear. Brexit has been mutilated into irrelevance. Starmer’s “sensible socialism” is indistinguishable from the policies of a party that has, with an air of meek reluctance, raised taxes to a peacetime high. While once voters felt a responsibility to back the Tories, they now feel a moral imperative to cleanse them from the political landscape. There is no upside to keeping the current PM in No 10. 

Even by the standards of the managerial elite, Sunak is inadequate. Far from dominating the centre ground, he falls between two stools. He is rejected by puritanical metropolitans, who despise his wealth and revile his complexity, as a British-Indian Brexiteer who favours tougher border control. He is viscerally disliked by mutinous Middle England, who are nauseated by his blandness, and despair at his earnest insistence at playing by establishment rules. 
The party is set to be hammered on all sides, with a rout in the Red Wall, aggressive Lib Dem raids into the Blue Wall and the final completion of its drawn-out collapse in London.

Sunak is an awesome brain, but he is a dreadful politician. He obsesses over second-order issues but procrastinates over crunch questions, such as how the Tories can distinguish themselves from Labour and whether they should pledge to leave the European Court of Human Rights.

He is even worse than Boris Johnson at running No 10. The latter ran Downing Street like a nasty medieval court, riven with factionalism. Sunak’s Downing Street, is an enlightened theocracy, more akin to the 19th‑century Vatican. In the No 10 bunker Rishi Sunak MBA – the cleverest man in the room – radiates an aura of almost papal infallibility. When he is wrong – or, more often, misses the point – he is left dangerously unchallenged.

Even Sunak’s one-time supporters must admit that his appointment hinged on an underestimation of the Tory party’s predicament. Sunak was touted as the candidate to turn around the political equivalent of a failing firm – one knocked off course by black swan events and compromised by scandals. 

Like any good management consultant, Sunak endeavoured to knock Tory plc back into shape through the enforcement of targets and discipline. Yet the Tory party is not merely a failing business, but an insolvent one. Even in this era of liberal hubris, the fusty Tory party has proved hopeless at translating small c-conservatism into modern currency. 

Amid 21st-century stagnation, its post-war operating model – balancing relatively low taxes with a reasonably generous welfare state – has finally gone bust. The party has run out of political capital, wrongly gambling after Brexit that it could just about get away with maintaining an open-border status quo. At best, it poorly understands its core customer base. At worst, deep down, it despises it.

The priority for the Tory party now is to avoid total liquidation. What it therefore needs is not a technocratic fixer but someone who can negotiate the party’s entry into the political equivalent of administration – that is to say, an arrangement whereby creditors (not least the Red Wallers who lent the party their votes) are kept at bay while it can drastically restructure itself into a viable organisation. 

That requires someone who has charisma on the campaign trail and isn’t reviled by the party’s Right. It requires someone who grasps the reality that the Tory party can only survive as a pro-growth, low-migration movement, culturally oriented to the provinces rather than the metropolitan centre. It requires someone who can kill the Reform threat by convincing a high-profile populist such as Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson to join their Cabinet. 

With the party short on talent, there are few candidates. Neither Kemi Badenoch nor James Cleverly boast the entire package, but they may be contenders. What is clear is that Sunak must go. Some might be tempted to stick with “sensible”. But marching off the cliff in an orderly manner doesn’t make the 1,000-feet drop any less fatal.