IS Rishi Sunak really in with the bricks?

The received wisdom is that the Tories’ fourth PM in as many years cannot be dislodged without triggering a Tory-busting General Election – so he won’t be facing any blue-on-blue challenge, no matter how much he irks his fellow MPs.

Sunak did predict the meltdown produced by Liz Truss and her catastrophic mini-Budget, which gives him a veneer of credibility with voters down south.

And even though Labour are still way ahead of the Tories in the polls, Sunak personally is viewed as more economically competent than Starmer. I know. It’s crazy. But he’ll hang on to that sole optimistic poll-finding like grim death – aided, abetted and roared on by those Tory backbenchers who aren’t improving their post-election employment prospects by heading Down Under.

Sunak does indeed look 100% more credible than Liz Truss (not difficult). But already missteps abound. And any one of them – or the whole collection – could cause the Golden Boy to come a cropper.

He is, for example, finally going to COP27. Grand – though he U-turned so soon after news broke that Boris Johnson was heading to Egypt as host of COP26, that his grudging trip already looks like the worst kind of tokenism.

If he “shows and goes”, it’ll be obvious Sunak was more worried about being upstaged by his predecessor than tackling the climate emergency.

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If he hangs aboot, Sunak must persuade world leaders he’s serious after spending last week saying the COP summit was not more important than “pressing issues” at home. Jings, do Biden and Macron not have “pressing issues” too?

Worse though, Sunak will have to report on progress since the big promises made by Boris in Glasgow last November. And the report card for Britain isn’t looking good.

Apart from ramping up fossil fuel exploration and removing COP26 president Alok Sharma and Climate Minister Graham Stuart from his Cabinet, Sunak has done nothing climate-friendly, unless you count postponing the decision on re-opening the controversial new coal mine in Cumbria. It’ll be announced on December 4 – after the climate talks have finished. Sweet.

The only really big climate development happened when Sunak was chancellor and failed to hand over $300 million promised to support decarbonisation projects in the developing world. A UK minister admitted this summer that “climate finance cash” was used to buy weapons for Ukraine. Is that where climate cash for the poorest nations has gone? And how bad does that look in the wake of Sunak’s other decision to cut overseas aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP?

The Prime Minister will need the brass-neck of a Tory and the hide of a rhinoceros to persuade leaders of the Global South not to ramp up fossil fuel production for their own industrialisation, in response to this unaccountably stupid betrayal by the hosts of COP26.

In short, Rishi Sunak’s climate credibility is already shot and he hasn’t even set off yet. Attending COP27 will deliver no boost to his international standing – only more painful reminders of Britain’s perpendicular fall from grace.

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Next comes the small matter of our collapsing public services.

After a two-year Covid hiatus, nurses and junior doctors are once again heading to Australia in droves. Who can blame them? Rota gaps – which cannot now be plugged by EU staff – will soon become chasms. Pay was utterly inadequate before the extra stress of Covid and the present surging inflation. Amazingly, this meltdown hardly makes news, although the chief executive of NHS England has warned that things are now worse than during peak Covid; the BMA says four in 10 consultants are planning to leave or take time out and the RCN’s largest-ever strike ballot has just closed, with Unison health workers voting for another three weeks, except in Scotland where there’s been an improved pay offer.

If the “angels” do strike in the New Year, how will our millionaire PM cope or explain that away?

Especially if nurses are joined by striking workers across all professions, infuriated by recent newspaper reports that 2023 settlements will be 2% – whatever the inflation rate.

Of course, it’s true that most Tories give not a single toss about the climate crisis or the pay of key workers. But the public does. And Sunak’s much-vaunted “compassionate conservatism” relies on his ability to keep doing one thing while saying another. He must keep suspending disbelief.

The determination to do what the hell he likes makes you wonder if Sunak and Hunt actually engineered the Truss victory. After all, the emergency she generated has become the ideal excuse for dispensing with democratic procedure and allowing Sunak to behave like the man leading a national government – a wartime premier, minus the war. And so shellshocked are the public in England, he seems to be getting away with it.

But not only are storm clouds gathering.

There’s one decision he’s got utterly wrong.

Suella Braverman’s handling of the refugee issue has done the impossible – uniting the progressive left and callous hard-right against her and Sunak’s government.

Much has been said about the crassness of her “invasion” remarks – politely disowned within hours by the Immigration Minister.

Always the first sign of a coat on a shoogly peg.

And Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday made it clear that both sides of the House smell blood.

Keir Starmer’s main question was spot on. “The Home Secretary says the asylum system is broken. Who broke it?” No answer.

The Labour leader joked that Braverman had more chance of “becoming the next Tory leader than processing an asylum claim in a year” – the nub of the problem. Only 4% of people arriving in small boats last year have had asylum claims processed. In 2014, almost 90% were decided within six months. It’s as if post-Brexit Tory governments have just shut up shop on refugees.

True, Starmer made no mention of the petrol bomb attack on a refugee centre, or reports of diphtheria, scabies and Covid at the Manston Processing Centre, concentrating instead on the lack of “grip” and Tory ineffectiveness.

But ironically this chimed with right-wing Tory backbenchers like Scott Benton, who asked pointedly at PMQs when Sunak’s Ten Point Plan to combat the “outrage” of mass asylum seeking would finally be delivered. Very strange bedfellows.

But both sides have their political guns trained on the Home Secretary.

Now to be clear, the very sight of Suella Braverman makes my blood run cold.

But the sadism of her “dream” probably won’t be what trips her up.

Henceforth, when frothing Tory MPs or hysterical right-wing tabloids raise migration or asylum-seeking, they will only highlight the chronic mismatch between “the Braverman dream” and the nightmarish, stuck, mismanaged, inhumane reality she has created – a Britain where refugee children are left for months in blankets on cold, concrete floors with asylum claims that have progressed not a single inch.

Who would be the man who appointed such a Home Secretary?

And yet, if not Braverman, then who must appear in her place to appease the vulture-like Tory right?

No matter what the Tory press would have you believe, Rishi Sunak ain’t out of the woods at all.