On Thursday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Cabinet dragged their way up the gravel driveway of his country estate in Britain, bracing themselves for an uncomfortable afternoon.
To boost morale, Sunak brought his A-team to Chequers, about 80 kilometres away from Westminster. Although only three months old, his administration was stuck in a rut. With an election less than two years away, strikes in Britain have disrupted daily life and even put voters’ lives in danger, while a steady stream of bad economic data shows the country will get little relief in the short term and there is little spare money to address problems.
But the prime minister had data showing that things could be turned around if the Cabinet could put aside their differences and work together to solve the country’s problems.
People with knowledge of the ministers’ private meetings in the days leading up to the meeting said tensions and disagreements over the direction of the government had at times boiled over. The ministers gathered in the 16th century manor house were surrounded by dark, enormous portraits of English aristocrats.
Nadhim Zahawi, chairman of the Conservative Party, is fighting for his political life after a week of revelations about his tax affairs, and several ministers have said privately that he should already have done the decent thing and resigned from the government. This made for an awkward situation.
Sunak had enlisted the help of his polling guru, Isaac Levido, to help get everyone on the same page. The Australian political strategist sat down with the Cabinet in the bleak January weather of Buckinghamshire and explained how they could still reverse the Labour Party’s commanding poll lead and hold on to power for a historic fifth term.
The following discussion of their meeting is based on interviews with several attendees and other officials who were briefed on the discussion.
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Levido used his research with pollsters and focus groups to lay out the public’s unfavourable opinion of Sunak’s Tory government in bare detail. He told the members of the party that has been in power for the past 12 years that the British public has a general sense that nothing is going right in the country right now.
However, he did have one major reason to be optimistic.
According to Levido, there is not a strong desire among voters to choose a Labour government. To solve the country’s myriad problems, all they want is a government that can.
The presentation was hailed by one minister as the most practical plan they had heard so far for how the Conservative Party could prevent what is widely expected to be an inevitable loss in the next election. In any case, Levido made it clear that they no longer have much room for error. The minister emphasised that everything must be discarded immediately.
The five-point plan that Sunak has outlined to get his stymied government back on track—halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing debt and National Health Service waiting lists, and halting the dangerous flow of refugees across the English Channel from France in flimsy boats—is the focus of their efforts.
