Rishi Sunak’s first week back in Westminster turned out to be an elegant summary of the predicament he finds himself in. The Prime Minister is a technocrat who believes more than anything else in getting through the “too difficult” bit of a leader’s in-tray and making things work better. But the in-tray isn’t so much groaning as cracking under the weight of crumbling concrete in schools (and everywhere else), an escaped prisoner from a jail where staffing was so short officers reportedly sometimes asked inmates to help them do the register – as well as all the other crises we had long known about in the health service, illegal immigration, and so on.
Of course, we in fact did already know about the concrete crisis, and the fact that the justice system is also cracking, for a long time. As Sunak himself reminded at Prime Minister’s Questions this week, problems with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete had been known since the mid-90s: the reason schools were suddenly told to close buildings containing RAAC this week was that the risk assessment had changed.
A particularly lame attack line from his backbench colleagues was that Labour had known about RAAC for 13 years, but hadn’t done anything about it. It’s the kind of slam dunk you can do on coming into office, not at the end of your own 13 year period of also doing nothing about an issue.
Sunak’s Education Secretary Gillian Keegan thought she was off-mic when she complained that no-one was thanking her for doing a ‘f***ing good job’, but both she and the Prime Minister have indeed come late to a problem their predecessors sat on their backsides and ignored. Presumably the calculation of the four Conservative prime ministers and 10 education secretaries who came before them was that by the time these chickens came home to roost, it would be to a coop run by another party.
Well, the chickens have come home to roost, perhaps earlier than the Tories expected, or perhaps the long line of people at the top of the party never really believed they’d be in power for this long. Certainly few of them thought that the past 13 years would involve the party repeatedly squandering the majorities it did manage to win to the extent that it has scarcely had the time to move from the bit of the in-tray marked “urgent and important” to the “important but not urgent” section where public buildings languished.
Our political culture hardly rewards people who work on important but not urgent matters, either. It’s easy to focus here on the electoral cycle, which encourages an attention span of five years. Secretaries of State in big delivery departments have been asking potential recruits to set out how they might deliver something that looks like success within ever-shrinking windows: one whose projects are necessarily very long-term was nonetheless asking interviewees what they thought they could show for their work within a year, because that’s when the next election is due. But no-one (not even an exhausted Touy) really wants an even longer cycle that denies voters the chance to hold their politicians accountable in a reasonably timely fashion. There are other ways in which short-term thinking flourishes in Westminster.
Most of us reach a point around our early twenties when we realise, often with some satisfaction, that the most confident people around us are not necessarily the most able. The fellow student who predicted they’d get a first without any evidence of hard work or aptitude. The tremendously self-impressed person sitting next to you at a job interview who you never saw again. Sadly, this realisation seems to have passed a lot of people in Westminster by: you can spend years proclaiming confidently that you’re doing a great job – and there is enough credulity in the system to allow you to keep bullshitting your way through, to use a Keegan-sequence turn of phrase. By the time it transpires that you haven’t done a good job, you’ll have fled the scene anyway.
David Cameron and George Osborne spent most of their tenure dressing up as builders, with their own hard hats and hi-viz jackets, despite failing to reform the planning system so that enough homes were built, bring the school and NHS estates up to scratch, address a creaking justice system or reform social care. There are children who don builders’ costumes who achieve more in a sandpit.
Of course, these two had the excuse of being in coalition with the equally short-termist Liberal Democrats: their leader Nick Clegg famously boasted that there was no point in investing in nuclear power because the new plants wouldn’t be in operation until 2022 (which turned out to be the year Britain could really have done with a bit more energy security and a bit less reliance on Russia). Then of course they had a majority for a year before they squandered it on Brexit. Then Theresa May squandered the actual majority by trying to get a bigger one.
Boris Johnson got the parliamentary numbers to get his way, but then blew up his own authority with his behaviour. Liz Truss took a few weeks to realise that she didn’t have a majority of Tory MPs backing her. Sunak tends to avoid doing anything to highlight how fragile his command is over the notional Tory majority. But even with that careful management which means dodging the same issues that Cameron ducked a decade ago, Sunak is the one watching the chickens come home to roost. Even someone doing a truly effing good job would struggle to fix these problems in time for voters to thank them.