Should we feel sorry for Rishi Sunak?

Sunak may not even be the prime minister by then, arguably an even worse embarrassment than the one he faces at the ballot box. On Thursday came suggestions that another Conservative leadership contest is inevitable should West Midlands and Tees Valley mayors Andy Street and Ben Houchen join the long list of expected Tory casualties at the local elections on May 2.

No-one comes into politics to fail this badly, this often. It is presumed that Sunak set his sights on Westminster as a staging post on a golden path that has as its next step a huge job in tech, but his Downing Street tenure has exposed his limitations and surely damaged his career prospects.

There’s something of Kendall Roy in the Succession finale about Sunak now, especially when you read that he has been asking aides, “am I not very good at this?” The end of Succession shows us that tragedy is still tragedy even when it befalls the entitled son of a billionaire; the same is true of a billionaire’s entitled son-in-law.

Sunak is dislikeable and robotic, but the movies have taught us to have sympathy for even the most villainous robots as they face up to their own end – think of the treacherous Ash in Alien, the homicidal Roy Batty in Blade Runner. It must be the case then, as he prepares to be written out, that we feel a twinge for Rishi Sunak, an android who dreams of electoral sheep.

Except… there’s the fact that the prime minister is not only the author of his own misfortune, but much of ours too. Two examples of this have surfaced in the last week.

We are told that Sunak decided against holding the general election along with the locals on May 2 because of his conviction that the national mood will soon change as lower inflation, falling energy tariffs, cuts in national insurance and a higher living wage see the beginnings of a smile start to play across Britain’s face.

Access to 15 hours of free childcare for parents of two-year-olds across England was supposed to be part of the good news, and Sunak has been banging the drum for the policy this week. Yet many parents seem to be struggling to access this new benefit, even before it is extended to parents of children from the age of nine months in September.

Part of the reason is Brexit, which Sunak backed. It persuaded many European workers in the childcare sector that it was time to go home. Now the Sunak-supported obsession with cutting net migration makes it harder to replace them; this week new visa wage thresholds for foreign workers come into force, meaning that someone from overseas intending to work in childcare needs to earn at least £38,700 a year – far higher than the £23,795 a year minimum wage that is common in the sector.

It is not only here that Sunak’s own policies frustrate his hopes of resetting his premiership, and leaving the EU is again a factor. From April 30, the long-awaited post-Brexit checks on consignments of plant and animal products from the bloc will finally come into play.

These have been delayed five times, and with good reason – even Jacob Rees-Mogg, once in charge of their implementation, could see that this Brexit benefit would hit small- and medium-sized importers the hardest. The alternatives are to stop importing certain goods altogether, leading to business failures and the bad PR of empty shelves, or the added costs can be passed on to consumers, leading to higher prices and rising food inflation at a time Sunak and Jeremy Hunt need it to keep slowing.

And this is only the self-sabotage of a single week. The truth is that a stubborn belief in a failed policy doomed Sunak from the moment he walked into No 10 on October 25, 2022, and it will dog him until the day he leaves.

So, save your sympathy for the rest of us living through the consequences of that belief. And double your determination to start to put things right when the time finally comes.