Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet of the Living Dead

One of the reasons this Tory government has survived to dog us for so long is because of its infuriating ability to reinvent itself. In 2016 the newly installed May government somehow – thanks to a change of prime minister, the noisy decision to sack George Osborne and so on – managed to convince the voting public that these were not the exact same people who’d been running the country for six years. Then, when Boris Johnson arrived in 2019, they managed to pull the same trick again.

This was, for anybody hoping to hold the government to account, not to mention prevent the country from sinking into the sea, intensely irritating.

There are a number of reasons to suspect this trick doesn’t work quite so well anymore. It’s difficult to know whether Liz Truss would have gotten away with it, since her installation was followed pretty much immediately by the death of the Queen, two weeks of mourning, and then a decision to gleefully drive the economy at 90 miles per hour into a wall.

Tory PM number 5, however, is certainly not being afforded the use of a reset switch. Headlines concerning the looming fiscal crisis, or the return of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary after her long not-quite-week in the wilderness, suggest less glad confident morning than rolling chaos. Perhaps that’s why the widely predicted Sunak bounce has thus far succeeded only in reducing Labour’s lead in the polls to a mere 25 percentage points (exactly twice the lead, as it happens, as the party achieved in 1997). That the opposition is still polling at 50 per cent or more suggests that, just maybe, the electorate has simply had enough.

There’s another reason the voters may not be buying that Rishi Sunak’s government – like May’s, or Johnson’s – is a completely different bunch of people to the one that preceded it. It’s that it quite literally isn’t.

Sunak himself was, as chancellor, the most popular figure in the ancien régime. This was annoying for those of us who thought he was rubbish at it, but it does now mean that, for good or ill, he’s still associated with that regime. His own Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt – a man he did not appoint and cannot move – may be sensible, a grown-up, a safe pair of hands and all those other phrases we use to describe…