Decline of the Rishbot
The Prime Minister's deeply robotic and impersonal approach to politics is leaving voters increasingly cold
Earlier this week I watched the Prime Minister address a crowd of intensely bored-looking warehouse workers inside a vast IKEA warehouse in North Kent.
The choice of venue for the so-called ‘PM Connect’ event was quintessential Sunak. Perched on the edge of the Dartford marshes amid similarly cavernous Amazon and DPD distribution barns, the tightly-controlled corporate setting gave Sunak the opportunity to appear to be listening to the concerns of “ordinary” voters, while avoiding any actual meaningful contact with them.
Watched over closely by their managers, and Sunak’s own increasingly harassed looking aides, the workers mostly did what was expected of them - asking predictably safe questions about leadership and ‘values’ - while avoiding anything that might in any way embarrass their guest.
Yet with so many political elephants lumbering menacingly around the warehouse behind the Prime Minister, one of the selected workers decided they had no choice but to point at least one of them out.
“I was going to ask…” the man began quite gingerly.
“Do you have any ideas on how to help the NHS?
“Because I've spoken to some family members of mine and they've had to be waiting 45 minutes for an ambulance and my grandmother just had to book six months to see a Doctor.
“So what is going on? Any ideas?”
It was an excellent question. Both deeply personal and to the point, it got to the heart of the basic concerns and difficulties facing most families around the country right now. It also gave the Prime Minister an opportunity to show that he also shares those same concerns and knows exactly what to do about them.
It was not an opportunity he rose to.
“Yeah lots,” Sunak replied, before instantly switching back to his script about his “five priorities”.
“I talked about that speech I made where I set out my five priorities,” he began.
“They were cutting inflation, growing the economy, reducing waiting lists, and stopping the boats.
“We should probably talk about all of those hopefully.”
If this was his way of showing empathy for a man struggling to get healthcare for his family, then it wasn’t going well.
After blaming Covid for the current record high waiting lists on the NHS, the Prime Minister then attempted to reassure the man that it was all going to be okay, insisting that “we've got a really, really good plan” to tackle the problem.
This plan, he said, involved “being a bit clever about how we do things”, while shifting some NHS services to supermarket clinics.
All in all it was a truly dreadful answer. Both impersonal and vague, condescending and patronising, it demonstrated all of the reasons why the Prime Minister has failed to make any real meaningful connection with the British public.
As I write in the new print edition of Byline Times, while Sunak was appointed to Downing Street in a desperate bid to save the party from a potentially extinction-level event under Liz Truss, he has in some ways made matters even worse for them over the past seven months.
By focusing so robotically on his “five priorities”, Sunak is merely further emphasising how badly his own government is failing on all of them, while ignoring the many other equally important concerns that voters currently have.
As the pollster Luke Tryl, who has run focus groups all round the country in recent months told me, this deeply impersonal approach to politics, which Sunak’s own repeated use of private helicopters, and awkward personal interactions with members of the public only further emphasises, is leaving an initially receptive voting public, increasingly cold on the Prime Minister.
“Voters had fallen out of love with Boris by the end,” Tryl said.
“But it wasn’t like Rishi coming in has allowed them to recapture that, because they just don't see it.
“They don't get that connection and the wealth gaffes have really cut through with people.
“They say in focus groups ‘God yes did you see he asked a homeless man what his job was?’ That stuff has really cut through".
Evidence of this can already be found in the polls.
A new YouGov poll in today’s Times puts Labour 25 points ahead of the Conservatives, with Sunak’s party just a few points above their lowest level under Liz Truss. With lots more economic pain to come, Sunak’s robotic approach risks leading his party to exactly the sort of extinction-level event he was brought in to avoid.
A Price Worth Paying
The decision by the Bank of England this week to once again raise interest rates further highlights this growing disconnect. The decision, which some economists predict could force the UK into a deeply damaging recession, will have real-world impacts on the jobs and livelihoods of millions of people.
Such a recession, which Sunak’s own Chancellor has previously suggested would be a price worth paying in order to bring down inflation, would not only cause real hardship, but would also put even further strain on our already stretched-to-breaking-point public services.
Yet rather than face up to that brutal reality and explain why he believes it is necessary, Sunak instead told the assembled warehouse workers that “I’m here to tell you that I am totally 100% on it, and it's going to be okay.”
If that weren’t panglossian enough, Sunak rounded up the event by telling the assembled workers how impressed he had been with their “incredibly eloquent” questions.
It’s unclear why the Prime Minister found the ability of warehouse workers to string a few questions together to be ‘incredible’, but it hardly helped remove the lasting impression of a politician unable to make even the most basic connection with voters.
At that point I might have expected a more skilled politician to have taken the opportunity to stick around and chat informally with the workers. Yet Sunak is not that kind of politician and within a few seconds he was whisked out of the warehouse doors by his aides to the motorcade (or helicopter) that was presumably waiting for him nearby.
As a metaphor for the deep problems both Sunak and his Government currently has, this event was hard to beat.
Not only unable to connect with voters, but seemingly unwilling to even try, Sunak is now rapidly leading his party and his Government to the exit door. His robotic approach to politics, and his almost uncanny remoteness from the ordinary concerns of the people he is meant to serve, is leaving them in the worst of all possible worlds.
It didn’t have to be this way. Under a different leader, the Conservatives may have been able to cast enough doubts about Keir Starmer’s own somewhat robotic leadership style to narrow the gap with Labour.
Yet Starmer’s own personal ratings, while also bad, are still nowhere near as bad as the Prime Minister’s. And in an electoral system like ours, you don’t need to actually be good in order to win. You just need to be less bad than the other guy.
And as the general election looms ever closer, Sunak’s deep flaws as a politician are only becoming more apparent.
Flinging a Dead Cat on the Table
This week’s confected row over whether or not school children are identifying as cats (they’re not obviously) only further highlights the deep disconnect between this Government and the voting public.
As new figures show inflation in the UK remains at the highest level in the G7, with interest rate rises set to add hundreds of pounds to people’s mortgage bills, ministers have instead spent their week concerning themselves with the non-existent problem of schoolchildren wanting to use litter trays.
At any other time, ministers wasting their time writing letters to each other about cat children would be utterly farcical, but at times like this it is downright criminal.
Yet while it is easy to mock such obvious distraction techniques, there are real-life consequences to this.
Every time newspaper front pages, 24 hour news shows, and Government ministers hype up such stories, they are making society just a little bit more hostile for anyone whose own identity does not conform to the average.
Whether its teenagers uncertain about their own gender, or anyone whose appearance is naturally androgynous, but who now increasingly finds themselves targeted and questioned about their sex, the current moral panic over trans women and gender identity is making life significantly more difficult for an already vulnerable group of people.
Debates about women-only spaces and the age at which people should be allowed to change their gender are perfectly reasonable debates to have, if done sensitively. But by seeking to deliberately weaponise and mislead people about these issues in a desperate attempt to distract from the far more pressing concerns currently facing the country, ministers are not only abdicating their own responsibilities, but actively making matters worse.
As the recently leaked footage of the Prime Minister privately joking about trans women showed, it is clear that this Government’s only concern with this issue is as a political tool to be played to their own advantage.
By claiming, as Sunak’s spinners did afterwards, that the Prime Minister’s remarks were focused on his political opponents, rather than on the trans women concerned, only further misses the point.
By talking so mockingly about these issues, Sunak makes it quite clear that not only does he believes the idea of people wishing to change their gender is laughable, but that he believes anyone who actually seeks to take these ideas seriously is laughable too.
It is this troubling attitude which also lies behind the cat children story too.
Rather than deal openly and calmly with the issue of gender identity and the conflicts that surround it, Sunak and the journalists helping to confect these sorts of scare stories merely reduce the entire subject to a political farce.
For the Prime Minister and his supporters this is apparently a price worth paying. But for all the people who will now have their own identity even more mocked and ridiculed than it was before, it is a cost they could have well done without.
Not being able to use a cash card, only going to COP because Johnson decided to, not declaring his wife’s shares in a childcare company Gov subsidised, helicopters, cringey, unelected, taking Chancellor after Sajid Javid resigned for not letting Cummings choose his own staff, acting as dodgy as any other post-Brexit Tory but making it worse by actually being patronising enough to believe it’s not obvious and going on about how much integrity he has, backing Suella Braverman, dragging his heels on sacking any corrupt Tory who’s been found out, taking my protest rights away, wanting to take human rights away. MADDENING to watch him. This is was supposed to be an improvement on Johnson! He’s hopeless at politics, even when you take into account he had to follow Johnson and completely out of his depth IMHO. The problem is that the wrong people are being catapulted now into government and ministerial positions who have little ability or experience and are profiteering shamelessly and are also corrupt. Seasoned Tories like Heseltine and Grieve themselves are clearly horrified by what is happening in that party.
People who actually work for a living do not ask "incredibly eloquent" questions. (Guessing that expression was directed to those who 'questions' were completely pre-scripted.) Incomprehensibly out-ot-touch with regular people.
Workers ask pertinent questions and expect (sadly with little expectation) real answers. Sunak replied to the valid question about the current state of the NHS with the mindless slogan of his predictably generic "five priorities".
Worker: "What time is it?"
Sunak: "The UK has watches, clocks, sundials, timepieces, and Big Ben."
Covid remains the favorite fall-guy for everything (in this case, the NHS); everything else is the fault of the "Ukraine", another wide-sweeping, unscrutinized excuse. If those fail, thankfully the Tories can always blame the French. Throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks is not be public policy.
Thinking the brilliant John le Carre summed it all up perfectly: "If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing." It's politically safe until voters revolt, and it's easily propagandized as evidenced by Sunak's reply “I’m here to tell you that I am totally 100% on it, and it's going to be okay," as if no one can see right through him and his do-nothing Cabinet.