It would be easy to make a joke about how desperately Rishi Sunak needs an Easter miracle. Our Prime Minister certainly has the appearance of a man who believes he is being unfairly crucified – the weight of the world piled upon his slender shoulders. And he does sometimes give the impression that, in his heart of hearts, he’d quite like to react to any given outrage from his backbenches with a cry of ‘I’m not a naughty boy, I’m the messiah!’.
But despite all of that, resurrection looks an unlikely prospect for Sunak. He’s twenty points behind in the polls. His own party gives every impression of loathing him. Ministers are dropping like flies, and the local elections are going to haemorrhage Tory councillors, reducing further his activist base.
Little wonder, in light of all that, that aides to the Prime Minister have let it be known this week that he believes defeat ‘now looks inevitable’ – well… yah – and that Sunak is going to ‘concentrate on his legacy’.
What legacy, do I hear you ask? Very good question!
There are the chess tables in parks, for which local authorities were invited to bid last year, of course. There’s the ban on bubblegum flavoured vapes, too. There’s scrapping HS2. And that’s about it, really. Liz Truss may have crashed and burned in spectacular style, but she will be remembered – not fondly, of course, but we won’t forget her. Sunak? It’s difficult to imagine his premiership troubling any but the most niche of historians for long. The question this begs, of course, is why? Why has he done so little and done what little he has done, so badly?
Partly it is – to be abundantly fair to the guy – pure circumstance. The Conservative Party that Sunak inherited was both bitterly divided and punch-drunk. Brexit, 2017, Boris, COVID, Kwasi – leadership battles and economic death rattles, it all takes its toll. Perhaps no-one taking over when Sunak did would have been able to salvage anything serviceable from the mess.