These centred largely around the settlement which Mr Zahawi made with HMRC over supposed indiscretions. Most prominently, the PM dithered over the scandal surround Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs in late January. It’s one thing to have naff policy ideas, but his first 100 days have also seen him make serious errors of judgment. In a Britain which increasingly resembles the 1970s, it wasn’t exactly a rousing vision of the future. Not only were his key policies extremely vague, but several of them were as good as foregone conclusions: halving inflation by the end of the year and increasing growth, for example, are both things that economists have predicted will happen anyway. Considering the multifaceted clusterfuck Britain currently finds itself in, his announcement was completely underwhelming and schoolboyish verging on the downright insulting. There was the super-fluff of his ‘five priorities’, the first major domestic policy announcement of his premiership. Polling can be notoriously misleading and Mr Sunak is almost certainly more popular than Ms Truss ever was, but without the clean slate of a general election win, he has simply inherited the animosity and weariness that many people feel towards the Conservative government after twelve long years in power.įar from being the phoenix rising from the ashes of the Johnson-Truss petrochemical bonfire, Mr Sunak’s first hundred days have been marred by sleaze, scandal and generally floppy leadership. Recent polling puts Rishi Sunak at -29 points, dawdling 21 points behind the leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer (and unless we retake the Falkland Islands again, that is unlikely to improve much). Nevertheless, without the popular mandate normally provided by a general election win, Mr Sunak was always going to struggle to win the British public’s enthusiasm. In the UK, we vote for the party and not for the person. Instead, he was thrust upon us whether we liked it or not-something we usually chastise foreign dictatorships for. He wasn’t even afforded the dubious pleasure of being voted in by a rabble of curmudgeonly Middle-Englander fanatics like Ms Truss was. Most importantly, Mr Sunak was not elected to power. The new leader of our country was chosen literally over the weekend. There was also something distinctly slapdash about his accession. So when Mr Sunak finally entered office himself, he was already on the back foot. Her suicide bomber approach to economic management seriously harmed Britain’s economy and understandably elicited the ire of the masses. Mr Sunak’s troubles as prime minister probably began the day Liz Truss strutted in to Downing Street in September last year. Between Brexit (that great foot-shooting exercise), a global pandemic and two prime ministers that made The Chuckle Brothers look like a safe pair of hands, Mr Sunak would have had to abolish the monarchy, instigate nuclear war and appear on Love Island just to hold our attention. In fairness, a lot of the public’s collective ambivalence towards Mr Sunak may well be attributable to the political pummelling we’ve all had in the last few years. Unlike his two predecessors-whom I used to excoriate loudly at dinner parties to people who didn’t ask for my opinion-when it comes to our incumbent, my attitude is generally one of indifference. Mr Sunak has therefore managed to outlast even the hardiest, most chemical-laden lettuce that any British supermarket has to offer (although given the tabloid press’ penchant for alliteration, he was probably on the lookout for particularly resilient radishes or red sorrel).īut even after 100 days as PM, Rishi Sunak’s premiership seems a little flat.
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