No, Rishi Sunak is not a technocrat

It’s important for both the Tories and Labour to understand why he’s really failed

Even the papers most friendly to the Conservatives are struggling to find reasons why they might win. You still get the occasional half-hearted mention of 1992, as if that situation bore any resemblance to this one, but the fight has gone out of them.

Instead attention is turning, earlier than usual, to explaining the upcoming defeat, and Rishi Sunak’s inability to improve their fortunes. There is a general consensus that he is terrible at politics. He has never given a memorable speech. His interviews are typically an execrable mish-mash of unjustified boasting and rebarbative defensiveness. His approach to party management is so bad that Natalie Elphicke is somehow now a Labour MP.  

So far, so obvious. But the second part of the consensus is that he’s basically a decent, smart, hard-working chap, who is just not cut out of for the performative and irrational world of modern politics. A recent BBC profile quoted sources claiming “He is all duty and hard work” and the “the cleverest person in the room”.

Another recent profile by Trever Phillips for Sky claims he “is an energetic, likeable problem solver” undone by his inability to see that “voters aren't always governed by the logic of the computer.” Thus the word probably used to describe him more than any other – whether it’s meant as an insult, a compliment or a neutral description - is “technocrat”.

This is certainly the image Sunak projects. It’s his own self-image. You can see it when he starts frustratedly telling interviewers about how he’s ignoring the day-to-day noise and working hard every day on solving the nation’s challenges.

And to some degree it’s true. He does work hard. He is highly numerate. He does have a whizzy data dashboard allowing him to drill down into the details of his key policy areas. Unfortunately he’s also an absolutely terrible policy-maker. Technocrats are expert problem solvers, perhaps too bloodless to see the bigger picture, but nevertheless able to get from A to B. But for almost every problem Sunak has personally decided to get involved in, he’s made the situation objectively worse. Voters would be fine with a computer, if it worked.