‘It didn’t go very well.’ - Sunak’s latest attempts to connect with voters have once again fallen on deaf ears
“...unfortunately there is something [about Sunak] that is just not connecting with people. He’s just slightly out of touch. It’s the awkward laughter that I personally can’t stand. It just grates.”
- A senior Conservative
Having abandoned his previous PM Connect strategy of trying to appeal to voters directly, Rishi Sunak decided to do the next best thing by attempting to appear somewhat vaguely human in an extremely awkward interview on ‘Loose Women’.
It was remarkable for a number of reasons.
One of those reasons was that he ruled out the prospect of a general election happening any time soon, to the chagrin, I’m sure, of most people engaged enough to watch.
An aspect of the interview that was also interesting was when Sunak said that he would remain as an MP even if the Conservatives lost the next general election.
Sunak's complacency is evident, especially regarding the second point, as he assumes voters will choose him and that he will have the authority to decide his tenure. This is particularly bold given the recent local election results in Sunak’s own Richmond and North Allerton seat in Yorkshire - a constituency long held by William Hague and one of the safest Conservative seats - where voters elected a Labour mayor."
Some of the reasons - environmental, agricultural - were spoken about in my previous article:
‘What could possibly go wrong?' - An insecure Prime Minister discussing security to an insecure nation was never likely to be a recipe for success
There were many ironies in Rishi Sunak’s speech at the Policy Exchange earlier this week. The Prime Minister appeared to suggest that the nation’s security is contingent upon voting Conservative in the next election. This is audacious, especially considering that just to start, many of his own MPs are themselves feeling terrified and insecure.
Another aspect highlighted in my previous article was another catastrophic YouGov MRP poll last week indicating how Sunak himself would, in theory, not be among the 13 Conservative MPs left standing at the next election, and that because of a secret, underlying pessimism (along with pressure from ‘the wife’) Sunak himself was allegedly lining up a future job ‘in AI’ after the election defeat.
Going back to the first point, however, Sunak indicated that we could ‘book our holidays’. An election, he implied, would not happen until October at the earliest. As noted previously, the delay is fraught with risk - not least because it’s so deeply unpopular and will probably only serve to frustrate voters more.