Sunak sticks with five pledges despite local election losses

On Monday evening Rishi Sunak will welcome Tory MPs to Downing Street for a morale-raising garden party replete with pies from his constituency. While the soirée is billed as a post-coronation celebration, there is hope in government that it will also salve spirits dampened by the party’s dire performance in the local elections last week.

Conservative chair Greg Hands has been in “outreach” mode in the aftermath, seeking to silence the recriminations exchanged since the Tories eclipsed their worst expectations, shedding 1,050 councillors and ceding control of 50 councils in England.

While party chiefs insist they are listening to disgruntled MPs, Sunak and his officials are clear that the best route to victory in the general election is to stick with his strategy of “getting on delivering his five pledges” of halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing debt, cutting NHS waiting list and stopping the boats.

Tory officials say progress on these promises will show the party can run the country effectively after the chaos of the Johnson and Truss eras and help win back traditional Labour voters who switched their allegiance at the 2019 elections but are feared to have drifted back.

Sunak is “saying we need time to deliver — and that we’ve got a decent amount of time before the next election,” said one ally of the prime minister.

However, many in his party want him to sketch out a bigger and bolder vision to capture voters’ imagination — and to radically improve the party’s campaign machine.

One cabinet minister said the Tory local election campaign — launched by Sunak in the West Midlands without a media presence — had been “lacklustre”.

On Wednesday Hands met Conservative MPs representing the most marginal constituencies to discuss the party’s so-called ‘80-20’ strategy, under which it aims to defend 80 high-risk seats and gain 20 from the opposition.

Later that day he faced a barrage of complaints at the 1922 committee of backbencher MPs, including gripes that too few ministers helped canvass on the ground during the local elections — a charge disputed by Number 10 officials, who point out that more than 100 front-bench visits took place — and that insufficient resources had been deployed at regional level.

CCHQ is now hiring new campaign managers and digital specialists to prepare for the general election, expected next year, and has increased the pace of candidate selection.

Despite the growing backbench pressure on Sunak to change tack, Tory officials say the prime minister’s five priority pledges mirror the policy areas that matter most to voters — a claim borne out by YouGov’s tracker of the most important issues facing the country. However, their deliverability appears shakier than when they were first made at the start of the year.

Sunak’s three economic commitments — on inflation, growth and government debt — were all designed to be easily attainable, although the growth pledge appeared risky in January when wholesale gas prices were more than double current levels, and thought likely to hit household incomes hard and push the economy into recession.

The improved energy price outlook alongside more resilience in consumer and business confidence than feared has led most forecasters to ditch predictions of economic contraction. Andrew Bailey, Bank of England governor, said he now expected “modest, but positive growth” this year. That would meet Sunak’s promise to grow the economy, even if few people would feel significantly better off.

The problem with higher growth for the prime minister is that the BoE thinks it will come with higher inflation. In its latest forecasts, the BoE said there was a 50:50 chance of inflation being below 5.28 per cent in the final quarter of this year, only barely meeting Sunak’s pledge to halve it.

The third target, on debt, has not changed since the March Budget but Treasury insiders admit this is not a pledge that has resonance with the public.

On Sunak’s broadly worded promise that waiting lists for NHS treatment “will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly”, the party will have to defend a record in which treatment standards have been breached by ever-wider margins during their 13-year stewardship. The latest NHS performance data, published on Thursday, showed a record 7.3mn people waiting for treatment.

There are some signs of progress. Even though attention focused on the fact that more than 10,000 people are still waiting more than 18 months for treatment, more than 90 per cent of that cohort has now been seen.

Tim Gardner, assistant director of policy at the Health Foundation, a research organisation, said the size of the waiting lists was “relatively stable, despite a brutal winter and the recent industrial action”.

However, he pointed out that a promised plan to address chronic staff shortages and improve retention was now long overdue. Other health experts warn the service’s tight funding squeeze was complicating the challenge of clearing waiting lists.

Sunak’s final pledge — to stop ‘the boats‘ — is perhaps the most difficult to keep. More than 6,690 asylum seekers have arrived in the UK via small boats so far this year, with the total recorded last month surpassing that of April last year, according to Migration Watch UK. The government’s Rwanda deportation policy — a pillar of its plan to deter asylum seekers — also faces delays by legal action.

The difficulties in delivering the pledges is fuelling calls from anxious MPs for Sunak to rethink his strategy.

Meanwhile, other challenges are looming. Ministers and Tory aides are monitoring simmering discontent among backbenchers on a variety of issues, including Brexit, housing and immigration.

Moves among figures on the Tory right to regroup and reshape the party agenda will also be watched carefully by Downing Street. Next week a conference on the theme of national conservatism, at which several cabinet ministers are speaking, takes place in central London, while on Saturday a separate conference convened by allies of Boris Johnson takes place in Bournemouth.

One Tory official remarked that Sunak’s personal leadership should give MPs cause for optimism: “MPs have been door-knocking during the locals; they’ve got voter feedback. Nobody is saying they’re not voting Conservative because of Rishi Sunak, like they did last year with Boris. It’s the opposite. Rishi is our biggest asset.”

But another former minister is more pessimistic. “There’s no alternative to the current leadership or the five priorities. Most colleagues recognise that, but not happily. There’s a sense of resigned despair.”