Rishi Sunak made a song and dance about the importance of mathematics in what was trumpeted as a major speech last Wednesday.
Hmm. I’m quite sure the only aspect of number-crunching that actually matters to him right now is the number of days until the English council elections in May. If he gets the wrong answer there’ll be more knives out for him than for Daniel Craig in his next outing as Benoit Blanc (who claims to be the world’s greatest detective, but who is no Sherlock Holmes).
Anyway, the right answer depends on a number of subsidiary calculations, not least on inflation, recession, energy prices, settling the present strikes and reassuring millions of ageing Conservative voters that the NHS will be able to see them and fix them in their time of need. He has another calculation to make, too: how does he fend off a possible series of electoral challenges from a number of parties to his right, including Reform UK (which still has important ties to Nigel Farage) and The Reclaim Party (led by Laurence Fox, who now has a regular berth at GB News).
Neither party has actually declared its hand on standing in the local elections, although both say they will be fielding heavily whenever the general election is declared (which doesn’t have to happen until January 2025 at the latest). They would save a lot of money by staying out in May, but that also risks the Conservatives doing better than expected without them offering alternatives; or worse, allowing Labour to do so well that it builds an unstoppable head of steam in the run-up to the general election. A good performance by Reform and Reclaim would weaken Sunak, scare his MPs and push the party even further to the right than it is now.
Farage—now more of a pantomime celebrity than a serious politician—remains Sunak’s biggest problem. Reform’s platform is blunt: ‘The nation faces many challenges, but we can overcome them. To succeed, we need to do Brexit properly.’ What’s not clear is what is meant by doing Brexit properly at this point. Farage, who had been threatening to field against the Conservatives in 2019, pulled aside and gave the nod of approval to Boris Johnson and his ‘oven ready’ Brexit deal (which included the NI Protocol) in that December’s general election.
Has he, I wonder, any interest in finding a way to force Sunak’s hand on the protocol? If the UK/EU conclude a deal in the next few weeks, which seems likely, would the Reform Party gallop to the side of ‘Ulster’ unionism and field hundreds of candidates in both safe and potentially vulnerable Conservative councils? Or would Farage, like many in the ERG have done already, conclude that there are no votes from Conservatives or English nationalists for backing unionism in Northern Ireland?
But the Conservatives and its potential competitors on the right will be aware of recent opinion polls indicating increasing support for a second referendum on EU membership, along with increasing concerns that Brexit hasn’t and now won’t deliver on the promises made by the leave campaign in 2016. Even before these polls there was evidence of what is best understood as Brexit fatigue: in other words, people are now more concerned with the everyday challenges of the cost-of-living crisis than they are with what seems like the interminable fallout from the original referendum.
I think that’s where Sunak and most of his party is now. They want Brexit shifted to the past tense, freeing them to get on with sorting out the issues which will determine how voters vote in four months’ time. He wants to build up a party atmosphere focused on the coronation of Charles III, tied in with good news on falling inflation, energy and food prices. He really doesn’t want another battle front opened with the EU. And I’m fairly sure that goes for parties like Reform and Reclaim, too.
All of which suggests that the protocol is staying in some form or other. If a deal proves good enough for the UK and EU then I think it will get through the Commons and Lords fairly easily. Yes, it would then be a case of a more likely than not rejection by the DUP, but Sunak’s government and the opposition parties will have already factored in that possibility.
Almost seven years on from the referendum there is a growing determination at Westminster, across the UK’s civic and business establishment and even within growing elements of the media that backed leave, to get Brexit finally done, dusted and away from the headlines.
