'A very noisy year, but ultimately another complete waste of time' - 2023 was the year most voters completely lost their patience with the Conservatives

Rishi Sunak was never going to shift the fortunes of the Conservative Party in 2023.

Over the last year, Sunak had feebly attempted to convey this message that he was the one to “end 30 years of the status quo in politics”; that was his core message to attendees and anybody sufficiently masochistic enough to watch the Conservative Party conference in October. 

Even prior to this, however - when he became Prime Minister - Sunak laid out his approach when he said: 

“I will unite our country, not with words, but with action. I will work day in and day out to deliver for you. This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level. Trust is earned. And I will earn yours.”

Yet this was never going to happen. Most, including perhaps Sunak himself, knew that he would not be the Prime Minister who could change anything - least of all about the way his clown-car of a political party chugged on through the Mad Max dystopian landscape of modern Britain.

As a result of his constant appearances in public, with one failed gimmick and policy failure after the next, Sunak - with his boundless, Disney-levels of blind optimism - just seemed to embarrass himself. More than anything, Sunak irritates the voting public with his delusion.

For context, Sunak came in at a point at a mid-term juncture in the first period of what was supposed to be a two or three term administration under Boris Johnson. With that in mind, and the added pressure of the legislative clock ticking down, all Sunak could ever possibly do was wait out the days until the next election whilst hoping and praying to the Westminster gods that enough sympathetic backbenchers would vote in support of whatever policy he put forward. 

Since January, very little has been ‘actually’ delivered, however. Certainly not enough to make any noticeable difference [for the better] to people’s lives. By automatic operation of law, then, we have less than a year now to the end of this 2019 Parliament.

Meaning #1 - the government has virtually no scope of defying the Lords under the Parliament Act to put forward any contentious primary legislation [ie. immigration policy, looking ahead to a showdown over the ECHR, etc]

Meaning #2 - there will probably be nothing ‘too challenging’ put forward by the government because it’ll inevitably be defeated in the Lords or sufficiently ripped apart so as to be unrecognisable.

This was most evident by the threadbare King’s Speech:

Until the point where Sunak could put the nation out of its misery and call a general election, the goal was to fill the headlines with as much noise as possible to disguise the fact that the government had no legislative or qualitative agenda to offer to the British public. 

Essentially.

Sunak, though he may have inherited a mandate, could not deliver a plan himself even if he did have one. On a legislative basis, the end was in sight before Sunak had even started his journey; any policy he brought forward would never be ‘too’ controversial for Sunak himself did not command the respect of the British public, let alone command a party that was more or less just left with him as their leader by default. 

For what Sunak sought to achieve, he needed a manifesto commitment.

For any major manifesto commitment to materialise, we need a general election.

Instead, Sunak has spent an entire year imposing himself on the country with unworkable, sometimes legally questionable policy, u-turn after u-turn, reset after failed reset, and the public dislike him immensely for it.