The reappointment of Suella Braverman as home secretary could blow a hole in Rishi Sunak’s hopes of holding onto power at the general election, polling guru Sir John Curtice has said
No government in modern times has ever survived at the ballot box following a fiscal crisis on the scale of last month’s market collapse sparked by Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, said Prof Curtice, of Strathclyde University.
With his personal ratings running far ahead of Conservative popularity, Sunak’s best chance of turning the polls round in the two years left is to persuade voters that the party has changed since the days of Truss, Boris Johnson and Partygate and now “plays by the rules”, he said.
In those terms, restoring Braverman after just six days to the post she lost due to a breach of the ministerial code represents a “risk”, Prof Curtice told a briefing in Westminster.
And her decision to throw the public spotlight onto the issue of migration by small boat across the English Channel is not “good politics”, he said.
“In so far as what you’re wanting to do is to persuade people that you’re controlling immigration, trying to focus public attention on the one thing that you cannot control and to do so in a way that actually gives the impression that the problem is greater now than it was – which of course is not true – doesn’t obviously strike you as good politics,” said Prof Curtice.
“You’re inviting people to look at your Achilles heel, whereas what you want to do is to deflect attention away.”
