History will judge Rishi Sunak kindly

Memorable, sweeping statements that come easily to mind have a habit of slipping into our accepted assumptions and ending up as a judgment of history. The word “concessions,” rather than the decisions Neville Chamberlain actually took, reduced the name of a defensive statesman to something like a slur. “The Milk Thief” did Margaret Thatcher enormous damage. “The Winter of Discontent” became an all too easy shorthand for a convergence of deep-seated problems that Thatcher herself approached with great caution.

The “dementia tax” was a key phrase in the eventual downfall of Prime Minister Theresa May, who proposed a rational way of meeting the costs of caring for older people: not that any new tax should be imposed on them or anyone else, but that the value of a home should no longer be excluded from the assessment of a taxpayer’s means when assessing eligibility for a share of the cost of care. Arrangements were available whereby they could keep their home until they died, drawing current income from its future value. The real losers, those who were to inherit, never liked the idea, but the term “dementia tax” misled millions of others into horror at the proposal.

I fear that this general election will add another devastating statement, as fluid as it is easy, to the list of deadly phrases ingrained in the national imagination. We certainly did not have “14 years of Tory misrule”. But it is hard to find any media commentary on this election that did not include the words “14 years” followed by one or another general critique of the Conservative government.

The truth is different. We had 14 years that were no different from any other long period of government: plenty of quiet competence and plenty of shameful incompetence; a few notable successes and a handful of macabre blunders; and, as usual, a handful of noteworthy scandals, some of little consequence, others of public shock.

Here is my view of our five prime ministers since the fall of Gordon Brown. David Cameron’s time in Downing Street, from 2010 to 2016, was a failure only if you think calling a referendum on Britain’s EU membership was a mistake. The real mistake (I think) was made by the electorate after he did it. He should never have asked us to do it, but he did, and that is democracy. Cameron’s other big gamble – the Scottish referendum – paid off. The SNP has never been the same.

Cameron’s term was also exceptionally well-run, accounting for almost half of the 14 years of Tory rule. I still miss the five years of coalition. Without “austerity” the economy could have collapsed, and many of the cuts he and George Osborne introduced were wasteful spending. The cuts in local government were too severe, and the Libyan adventure was a miscalculation – but so would his Labour predecessors. Cameron’s determination to get gay marriage law passed was brave, and throughout he looked and sounded like a proper prime minister. There was nothing mean, hateful or bitter about his leadership. I would welcome his return to Downing Street.

Theresa May was unsuited to the job, but she carried herself with dignity and brought intelligence and integrity to an impossible task. She had a kind of nobility about her. It all ended in the political equivalent of a terrifying traffic jam, but Brexit has made the Commons unmanageable for any prime minister with a slim majority. Imagine Sir Keir Starmer trying to negotiate with both the EU and his own party. Would he have done better? As a transitional figure, she held down the fort.

Boris Johnson’s term is the most serious prolonged disaster zone of any prime minister on this list. Enough has been said about his own moral qualities. But the sacking of an entire cadre of some of the party’s finest men and women was pure vandalism. For me, that was the final straw: I resigned. In his seemingly carefree and carefree way, Johnson has demeaned himself, devalued our politics and injected poison into the Tory bloodstream: a toxicity that endures. He will – mark my words – try to come back. Watch out.

The less said the better for Liz Truss. She left her successor in a shocking mess.

I think Rishi Sunak did a great job of getting the mature government back on its feet after Johnson and Truss. As Chancellor during Covid and then in Downing Street during a period of European war and global inflation, he stabilised the situation. It was he, not Johnson, who ultimately got Brexit done by solving a problem (Northern Ireland intervention between the UK and the EU) that May had defeated and that Johnson had failed to solve by talking dirty.

Sunak has shown a shaky hand in some of the minor matters that should be second nature to a prime minister. Insulting the Greek prime minister was rude and stupid. The bigger decision, amputating the section of HS2 that made it feasible, was astonishing. The D-Day blunder was hard to forgive. And calling an early general election seems no less mad now than it did then. But the fact remains that over the past 18 months the air of impending chaos that had gathered around the British government has subsided. The shouting has been replaced by the groans. And there has been a fundamentally decent, stable, even admirable figure in power. When the dust settles, and when Keir Starmer proves that there are, after all, no obvious answers, Sunak will be judged more mercifully.

And those 14 years of Tory rule as a whole? A mixed bag, sometimes awful, often impressive, from which Britain emerges in one piece and (looking over one shoulder at continental politics and over the other at America) in reasonable shape. It’s time for a change, so let’s see if Labour can make it look easy.