Remember the happy clappy Rishi Sunak? The caring Dishy Rishi? The chancellor who could look lovingly into the camera at Downing Street press conferences and promise that he would have our backs? Always. The Good Samaritan who smiled as he dug deep behind the sofa to pay our wages when our employers could not?
That Sunak is long gone. The new Rishi is a far snippier iteration. Someone who walks out of interviews when he doesn’t like the questions. Someone who is visibly irritated to have been forced to fill in a police questionnaire about the birthday party of a boss he cannot stand – and who cannot stand him; the dislike is mutual. Someone who is beginning to realise he might just have missed the boat.
A month or two ago, Boris Johnson looked like he could be a goner at any moment and Sunak a leading contender to replace him. The chancellor’s poll ratings with Tory members were consistently high and he had the aura of competency. Now, not so much. Half the cabinet, including the prime minister, are actively briefing against him and the other half are merely biding their time to see how the cards play out.
But Sunak is not going down without a fight. The job might be a lot tougher now many of his colleagues have withdrawn their support and he is having to take money off the country rather than hand it out, but he’s not planning on rolling over. And even though his spring statement had been torn apart by most independent analysts – along with some Tory MPs – he was determined to defend it to the death in his appearance before the House of Commons Treasury committee.
Like most things the chancellor does these days, it didn’t go particularly well. When your luck’s out, your luck’s out. Sunak began by running through the mini-budget headlines with committee chair Mel Stride. He had done the responsible thing by not increasing borrowing, Sunak said. He clearly didn’t count the promised income tax cut of 1p in 2024 as guaranteed to increase borrowing, because he was only counting the measures that were effective as from this year. So if he had had to squeeze the poorest, then it was their fault for not having saved more money when he had been so generous during lockdown. Or something like that.
None of this went down too well with the committee. Labour’s Angela Eagle observed that the government was presiding over the biggest fall in living standards since records began and that Sunak had chosen to put 1.3 million people into absolute poverty. Rishi immediately went on the attack. Well, what would she have done, he asked? Eagle drily observed that the committee hadn’t been convened to hear her choices.
Sunak then lapsed into fantasy. His was a tax-cutting budget even though the tax burden in the current parliament was increasing to its highest level since the 1940s. And no, he couldn’t do more to help people on benefits, as that would increase public borrowing. Look, it wasn’t his fault there had been a global pandemic and that energy and fuel prices were out of control. If some people had to go cold, then so be it. Quite right, said Anthony Browne, one of the few loyal Tories. If energy prices went down, people would only use more of it. And that would be bad for the planet.
“Well, Alison …” said Sunak as he talked over the SNP’s Alison Thewlis. He couldn’t have sounded more patronising if he had tried. The longer the session went on, the more out of touch the chancellor sounded. It was as if we were in an economics seminar with Sunak there to score academic points. He seemed to have no idea that he was talking about real people’s lives. To him it was just a game.
He couldn’t even accept that the £200 heating loan was a loan, that it would saddle people with more debt. Twice he insisted it was some mythical entity, halfway between a grant and a loan. He did, though, reluctantly concede that tax relief on solar panels would not benefit those on universal credit. But it would be dead handy for his gym and swimming pool. And it would also show the poor what they could aspire to if they worked harder.
Labour’s Siobhain McDonagh asked him about his disastrous PR stunt at the Sainsbury’s garage. How was the Kia Rio? Now Sunak got decidedly huffy. He was very honoured to have filled up someone else’s car, he said. When people were struggling with rising prices, it was the duty of millionaires to help out the less well-off. And by the way, his second car was only a VW Golf. He didn’t mention what his first car was.
That was just the preliminaries. For after Sunak had yet again bemoaned his luck at having to deal with an unprecedented series of global events, McDonagh wondered why it was that the UK was the only country in the G20 to be increasing the tax burden at such a time. “Do you think people are stupid?” she asked. Sunak shrugged. Of course he did. That’s why he had announced a tax cut to coincide with the next election. It would give everyone something to look forward to as they went hungry now.
The best came near the end as Conservative Kevin Hollinrake tried to tease out why the UK growth forecasts were so low. Rishi took this on the chin. Everyone had always known that a change in trading relationships with the EU would cause a hit to the UK economy. Really? That was odd. Because no one could remember seeing “Brexit will make you poorer” on the side of the bus. Maybe it had just been written in German.
Not that Sunak could bring himself to say the B word, even when committee chair Mel Stride followed this up. “Oh no, no, no …” Rishi stammered, suddenly aware he had disclosed the government’s worst-kept secret. The 18-year-old Treasury official sitting next to Sunak went white. The chancellor tried to cover it up by saying it was impossible to disaggregate Brexit from the pandemic, but Stride wasn’t having it. The truth was there in black and white. The OBR had a graph showing the UK worse off because of Brexit.
For the first time Sunak lapsed into near silence. Just waiting for the end. There were no photo ops to be had. No flags to pose behind. If his budget hadn’t been career-ending, then his Brexit indiscretion might be. His life was just going from bad to worse. It would be just his luck to end the week with a fixed penalty notice for Partygate.
