Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer had a good week. It already feels as if they are the future and Boris Johnson is the past. In the old aphorism about parliamentary politics, Sunak is Johnson’s enemy, while Starmer is his opposition. Not that I mean Sunak is personally hostile to the prime minister; it is just that he is a more immediate threat to Johnson than Starmer is.
Sunak’s good week consisted of his being photographed in John Lewis, helping to prepare it for socially distanced opening on Monday, and a Zoom meeting with Conservative MPs from which several of them came away gushing about how impressive he is. If the chancellor presents himself to a nation of shoppers as the guardian of never knowingly being undersold, he has direct access to the heart of Middle Britain.
And if he presents himself to the 1922 Committee Tory MPs as the person to lead us out of the valley of a 25 per cent drop in national income – in contrast to the prime minister who led us into it – he has a special hold on the allegiance of the body that has made and broken Tory prime ministers since 1922. The 1922 Committee was of course formed in 1923, but it takes its name from the election of the previous year, which was held after Tory backbenchers revolted against David Lloyd George and installed Bonar Law as prime minister.
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Starmer’s good week consisted of finessing an awkward Prime Minister’s Questions and basking in the best opinion-poll ratings for an opposition leader since Tony Blair. In the Commons on Wednesday, Starmer berated Johnson for failing to overcome Labour’s opposition to getting most primary-age children back to school before the summer holiday. The prime minister, who managed to look surprised at how unfair politics can be, accused his opposite number of being a lawyer – at which Starmer in turn seemed to take genuine offence.
Starmer was rewarded by the gods of opinion polls, when Ipsos MORI found that his net favourability rating, at plus 31, matched the previous record set by Blair in December 1994 – and indeed exceeded Blair’s rating at this stage, two months into his leadership.
I am trying to write about politics without mentioning Starmer’s immediate predecessor, but I would be failing in what Matt Hancock calls my civic duty if I didn’t point out that Jeremy Corbyn’s best net favourability rating was minus one, in July 2017; that is, just after an election which he lost.
The world is closing in on the prime minister. His opponent is advancing on him from in front, and his enemy is advancing from behind. His decision to stand by Cummings over his apparent breach of lockdown rules cost him so much public support he is now reduced to tweeting about statues.
Above all, Johnson has lost control of the story that the nation tells itself about coronavirus. The scientists say that if they knew then what they know now, they would have advised an earlier lockdown, but they didn’t.
In fact the most stringent measures were taken by Johnson, advised by Dominic Cummings, before the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies was definite about them. Johnson was indeed following the science, but it was the science of opinion research rather than of epidemiology. Public opinion, fearful of the disease and watching other countries lock down, was ahead of the scientists.
Yet the story that most people believe is that Johnson was too slow to lock down and that he is responsible for the UK having one of the worst death tolls per million in the world. Politics really is not fair. I am reminded of something Lord Lamont, the former chancellor, said when he came to King’s College London last year. He said he got into a taxi and the driver recognised him: “You’re that Norman Lamont, aren’t you?”
“No, a lot of people say that I look like him.”
“No, no,” the driver insisted. “You’re Norman Lamont – I saved your life once.”
“I don’t think you did,” said Lamont.
“I did,” the driver insisted. “I was driving down Pall Mall one day when my passenger saw you and said, ‘It’s that bastard Norman Lamont – run him over and I’ll double your fare.’”
Which was unfair, because Lamont, who was chancellor when the pound crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992, never supported the policy and seized on the opportunity of its ending to build an interest-rate policy that stood the test of time, laying the foundations for 16 years of steady economic growth.
Nevertheless, he was blamed by the public for the hardship caused by ERM membership, and replaced by the affable Ken Clarke in 1993.
Now it is Boris Johnson’s turn. He followed the scientists’ advice – even getting a little ahead of them on the lockdown decision – and yet the public blames him for Britain being one of the countries worst hit by the coronavirus. Meanwhile Sunak, who wants to cut the two-metre social distancing guideline (in defiance of public opinion), and Starmer, who wants to have it both ways on children going back to school, bask in the adulation of the growing legions of Johnson’s enemies – and his opponents.
