Sunak faces uphill battle as he falls short on pledges

Good morning. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, when I look over all the mistaken judgments and bad calls I made over the past year and what I think I can learn as a result.

My mistakes were made for you

I kicked off the year with what I can only hope is a career-worst terrible call about Rishi Sunak’s five pledges:

Politically speaking, these pledges are a great rhetorical device because Rishi Sunak is essentially guaranteed to be able to say he has met three out of five of them.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this, other than to say: well, it turns out that I have been even more humiliated by the five pledges than Rishi Sunak. He did not, in fact, meet three out of five of them. He did not meet two out of five of them. He met one: the inflation pledge, the commitment upon which he had the least direct influence and which all the forecasts suggested would be met.

What did I get wrong? Quite a few things. The first is that I allowed my cynicism about the inflation pledge to overly shape my coverage of the other pledges. This wasn’t entirely wrong — I wrote, correctly, that Sunak would try to say that he had met his debt pledge because it was a strikingly vague pledge. But I also thought he would try to claim he had kept his boats pledge by pointing out that he had literally pledged solely to “pass new laws to stop the boats”, which of course is a much softer target than the one he has tied himself to.

And I very badly underestimated the scale of the problems facing the NHS. I thought that the extra money put into the service after 2019 would start to work its way through the system and begin to deliver improvements in outcomes, just as it did in New Labour’s second term of office, and therefore this pledge would take care of itself. I should have talked to more policy specialists and focused less on my cynicism about the pledges.

From this I think I can take the following useful heuristic:

Cynicism is like a poison: it can be useful, but you should dilute it.

On a happier note, I was right to say that Kate Forbes was not going to be elected as leader of the SNP:

If the SNP membership elect a conservative evangelical as leader I am available to be knocked down by a feather for the remainder of the parliament.

This isn’t that deep. Forbes’ beliefs were a lot like Sunak’s tax-raising budgets: they put him at odds with too many Conservative party activists for him to win the leadership election. And in both cases, they also suffered because those deviations from the party mainstream hurt them with party power brokers (much of the rightwing press criticised Sunak bitterly during his first failed bid for the leadership in 2022 and much of the SNP establishment fell in behind Humza Yousaf). In both cases they lost to fairly flawed candidates.

So I think the heuristic we can learn here is:

You have to be part of your party’s mainstream to win a leadership election

Back tomorrow for Part 2, also featuring how I think the lessons I drew last year have held up.

Now try this

Being this time of year, it’s right to reveal the results of my Apple Replay for 2023 (it’s like Spotify Wrapped, basically, but with slightly different branding and an app that makes it easier to find classical music).

I listened to 131,132 minutes of music this year (that’s 91 days). My number one artist was Sir Colin Davis (whose LSO recording of the Sibelius cycle is a particular favourite), my most played album was Chvrches’ Screen Violence, my number one song was Death Cab for Cutie’s Pepper, and unsurprisingly my favourite genre was classical.

I’m very grateful for the various musical suggestions over this year: let me know what else I should be listening to by hitting reply.

Top stories today

• Off track | The government has come under fire from Labour mayors who have accused it of insulting northern England after it announced its latest Network North project: fixing potholes in London. The £235mn for road surfacing in the capital had been taken from “rerouted HS2 funding”, the Department for Transport said.

• Paying the price | Public sector pay deals in 2023 were one-offs and workers should not expect their wages to rise next year at the same pace, ministers warned yesterday, prompting a backlash from unions who had called for reform of the pay-setting process.

• See you in court | Ireland will launch legal action against the UK over legislation that would offer an amnesty from prosecution for atrocities committed during Northern Ireland’s Troubles conflict. Chris Heaton-Harris, the UK’s Northern Ireland secretary, called Ireland’s case “misguided”.