Rishi Sunak starts election year with a pretty flimsy argument - and time not on his side

Rishi Sunak kicked off the election year trying to sell to voters that his five pledges were on track, and they should vote for him to finish the job rather than “going back to square one”.

But look at his record, and it’s a pretty flimsy argument:

• NHS waiting lists are almost 500,000 higher than in January 2023;

• Boat crossings stood at just under 30,000 people in 2023, with 28,000 making the journey;

• National debt rose to 88.3% of GDP from 85.1% in December 2022. A promise he has delivered is halving inflation – although it’s true real household disposable income has continued to fall – while the economy looks on track to grow.

When he made those pledges, Mr Sunak told his audience “people don’t want politicians who promise the Earth and fail to deliver”.

But when it comes to the two key election issues beyond the economy – NHS waiting lists and stopping the boats – that is exactly where he looks like landing this side of an election.

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A good number of his own MPs are fearful that failing to tackle illegal migration in particular will cost them their seats.

That’s why the furore over whether the PM tried to water down the Rwanda scheme when he was chancellor matters.

As my colleague Rob Powell reported over the weekend, the leaked documents he saw showing the PM had doubts about the scheme when chancellor back in March 2002 raise concerns among MPs that his heart isn’t really in it.

That for all the rhetoric, this is a PM who isn’t really willing to do “whatever it takes” to put the policy into action.

Meanwhile, today I have been told by a Sunak campaign insider that when the PM was running to be Conservative leader in July 2022, he “wanted to scrap the scheme” and had “no serious interest” in illegal or legal migration “until he was persuaded otherwise during the campaign”.

When asked about this on a trip to the marginal seat of Hyndburn in Lancashire, the prime minister was prickly, saying it was “completely false” to suggest he had said during that leadership bid he was “going to scrap it”.

The eagle-eyed among you will note that what the PM denied was that he said he was going to scrap it, not that he wanted to.

And that matters, because it speaks to his commitment to getting Rwanda off the ground amid deep, irreconcilable divisions in his party over how far he should go to succeed.

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For voters, it perhaps also leaves a bad taste in the mouth that this is a prime minister who isn’t really straight with them – not only when it comes to make big pledges and following them through, but about what he stands for as a PM.

He likes to call Sir Keir Starmer a flip-flopper who plays politics, but his approach to Rwanda suggests he perhaps does the same.

What Mr Sunak would say in reply is he is pushing ahead with the Rwanda bill and getting boat crossings down. He would probably ask people to judge him on his actions not words.

So far, the judgment on his first 15 months in the job has been dire, with the polls failing to budge whatever he does.

He will hope if his economic pledges come good, voters will follow. But he doesn’t have much time left to turn the tide.

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