Rishi Sunak celebrated his first 100 days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom earlier this week.
In some ways, the fact that Sunak was able to attain this milestone at all was cause for celebration. When he took over from Liz Truss last October, she had only been in office for 49 days, making her the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history.
Truss has managed to plummet the government Conservative party’s poll ratings even lower than her predecessor, Boris Johnson, who will be known as the first prime minister found to have breached the law while in office.
So the fact that Sunak has survived 100 days while not being universally popular among Conservative party members or lawmakers is an accomplishment in and of itself.
However, this does not imply that his first 100 days were a success. Sunak has presided over some of the worst public sector strikes in modern history since taking office in Downing Street. Only this week, 500,000 workers went on strike across the country, halting schools, cancelling university courses, and shutting down the majority of the train network in what unions claim is the largest single day of walkouts in more than a decade.
Meanwhile, the beloved National Health Service is on the verge of collapse, millions are suffering from a cost-of-living crisis, and the International Monetary Fund predicts that the UK will be the only G7 economy to contract in 2023.
And then there are the controversies.
Following days of criticism over his personal tax arrangements, Sunak was compelled to remove the chairman of his political party, Cabinet Minister Nadhim Zahawi, this weekend for a “severe infringement” of the Ministerial Code.
The Prime Minister had directed his ethics adviser to look into accusations that Zahawi had paid a penalty as part of a purported £4.8 million ($5.96 million) settlement with tax inspectors. Zahawi was accused of failing to register a dispute with tax authorities.
It is also widely predicted that the Prime Minister would be compelled to fire his deputy, Dominic Raab, who is under investigation for several allegations of bullying civil officials over a number of years.
Raab rejects any misconduct and claims he has always acted properly.
Other members of Sunak’s close circle are also under review, raising concerns about the PM’s judgement, particularly with regard to individuals he considers loyal.
While his ruling Conservative Party’s poll ratings are slightly higher than when he first took office, they are still typically 20 points worse than the main opposition Labour Party. His personal approval scores are equally deplorable.
Given these poll numbers and the fact that the Conservatives have been in power since 2010, the next planned election in 2024 should be a foregone conclusion for the Labour Party. Sunak’s major task should be to minimise the expected defeat and provide his party with the greatest possible foundation from which to recover.
Despite everything that appears to be going wrong for the Conservatives, there are reasons to remain optimistic – and even to believe that they can still win the next general election. Commentators point to 1992, when John Major won a surprise election for the Conservatives that many expected would go to Labour led by Neil Kinnock – a memory that haunts the left-of-center party to this day.
The electoral system in the United Kingdom may still favour the Conservatives to the point where the Labour Party is denied a majority – or, worse, has less seats in parliament than the Conservatives.
The election method, known as first past the post, states that whoever party receives the most votes in each of the 650 parliamentary seats gets the seat outright, regardless of popular vote percentage. Traditionally, the party with the most seats forms the government. It is significantly easier to pass laws if they have an overwhelming majority in parliament.
This effectively suggests that not all votes are equal. A seat with 50,000 votes may elect a Conservative MP with a tight majority, but a seat with 90,000 voters may elect a Labour MP with a large majority. Both seats count for only one vote in parliament. This means that national polls can be deceptive.
Complicating matters further, a boundary review is under underway, redrawing the map of the UK and changing the makeup of a number of seats — typically to the Conservatives’ advantage.
“The difficulty that Labour currently confronts is that too many of its voters are concentrated in large, urban areas,” says Rob Ford, a political science lecturer at the University of Manchester.
“Even though Labour lost a number of seats in the 2019 election, they actually had a better vote share than in 2010 and 2015, despite winning more seats in both of those elections,” Ford says.
Labour has also traditionally relied on winning seats in Scotland, a bastion that was shattered in 2014 by the first Scottish referendum on independence. Despite losing the referendum, the pro-independence Scottish National Party received 45% of the vote. At the general election the following year, the independence support concentrated around the SNP, while the unionist vote was split, and the SNP wiped out almost all of Labour’s Scottish seats.
Only a few months later, Conservative MPs publicly admitted that they feared the next election would be a lost cause, with many losing their seats. Some people called journalists and think tanks for job advice. At the Conservative Party’s annual conference in October, AWN interviewed a serving cabinet minister who burst into tears when contemplating the party’s prospects.
In contrast, the attitude at the Labour Party’s annual conference a week before was undoubtedly one of a government in waiting.
Things have changed dramatically since then, and Labour candidates are now careful to point out that there is still work to be done.
“Between this point in the election cycle and election day, there is normally a move back towards the government,” says Chris Curtis, a pollster at Opinium Research and a Labour candidate in the next election.
“Momentum counts in politics and I’m anxious about losing the wind from our sails because expectations have been raised too high for this year’s municipal elections. “We must not become complacent and must continue to strive,” he continues.
The discussion of momentum and how individual politicians feel is sometimes derided as “bubble talk.” This bubble, though, is significant. If people in Westminster are more confident about their electoral chances, it helps to strengthen party unity and discipline.
None of this is to say Sunak isn’t up against it. Ford observes that “politics is unpredictable right now,” and that the Conservative Party has grown accustomed to “panicking and ejecting” leaders.
While some may take solace in the fact that the Conservatives have previously won elections that were widely predicted to be lost — in 1992 and 2015 – Sunak is less popular than the Conservative leaders in both times.
As the Prime Minister looks on his first 100 days in office, he may find solace in the fact that he was given the keys to a car that was driving over a cliff with a brick on the gas.
That car may not be back on the road just yet, but the fact that it isn’t a smoking wreckage is enough for many in his party.