Rishi Sunak pledge tracker: What progress is the PM making on his five goals?
The political thinking behind Sunak’s five pledges
Rishi Sunak announced his five pledges in January 2023 in order to show a decisive change of approach from the chaos of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss premierships.
The pledges, overseen by campaign chief Isaac Levido, were designed to show the Conservatives could take action.
Tory strategists worried that changing prime minister twice in a year harms public trust and would mean people no longer believe Tory promises.
They drew up a list of pledges they hoped could be delivered before the election, allowing them then to have more credibility when making further promises in the manifesto.
It was never likely to prove that easy. At the time they were announced – 4 January 2023 – they were seen as a challenge but not excessively ambitious. The last nine months have changed that.
Now Sunak’s struggles on every front are a defining part of his premiership, and today Sky News’s pledge tracker shines a light on just how hard getting this done remains.
Some of the problems, however, rest with the way the pledges were drawn up. Three of the pledges – on inflation, GDP growth and ensuring falling national debt – were on the economy.
In fact, the high inflation environment means that these three have pulled policy in different directions. For instance, more public spending could help boost GDP, but that would jeopardise the effort to bring down the debt.
Bringing down inflation has meant the Bank of England raising interest rates – yet this automatically hurts growth.
Another of the pledges, to ensure the NHS waiting lists are falling, did not anticipate the impact of the public sector strikes hitting the health service – the clearest sign that the government misread the situation nine months ago.
All of this despite the best efforts of Downing Street to give themselves every bit of wiggle room to ensure maximum flexibility. Look at the tricks they deployed: there was no deadline given for the pledges other than inflation, which would halve “this year”. Most are not expected to be met in 2023.
Sunak has refused to put a figure on what exactly halving inflation looks like, meaning he has a slightly wider margin for error just above 5% than many realised.
The pledge on getting national debt falling is not what it sounds – the amount of government borrowing will not go down in absolute terms, only as a proportion of GDP – something the Spectator regularly takes aim at.
And the government has promised to “stop small boats” but made clear that does not mean there will be zero small boats crossing the channel, without defining how low a number they are targeting.
Even with these fudges, however, the pledges are proving hard, which is why today’s tracker is vital.
“They’re not the limit of my ambitions for our country. They’re the foundation,” Sunak said on the day he launched them.
Could the fact he is struggling to be delivered delay the moment the public pay attention to his promises for the future?
Politics
Norman Tebbit: Former Tory minister who served in Margaret Thatcher’s government dies aged 94
Norman Tebbit, the former Tory minister who served in Margaret Thatcher’s government, has died at the age of 94.
Lord Tebbit died “peacefully at home” late on Monday night, his son William confirmed.
One of Mrs Thatcher’s most loyal cabinet ministers, he was a leading political voice throughout the turbulent 1980s.
He held the posts of employment secretary, trade secretary, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Conservative party chairman before resigning as an MP in 1992 after his wife was left disabled by the Provisional IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton.
He considered standing for the Conservative leadership after Mrs Thatcher’s resignation in 1990, but was committed to taking care of his wife.
Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit in 1987 after her election victory. Pic: PA
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch called him an “icon” in British politics and was “one of the leading exponents of the philosophy we now know as Thatcherism”.
“But to many of us it was the stoicism and courage he showed in the face of terrorism, which inspired us as he rebuilt his political career after suffering terrible injuries in the Brighton bomb, and cared selflessly for his wife Margaret, who was gravely disabled in the bombing,” she wrote on X.
“He never buckled under pressure and he never compromised. Our nation has lost one of its very best today and I speak for all the Conservative family and beyond in recognising Lord Tebbit’s enormous intellect and profound sense of duty to his country.
“May he rest in peace.”
Lord Tebbit and his wife Margaret stand outside the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Pic: PA
Tory grandee David Davis told Sky News Lord Tebbit was a “great working class Tory, always ready to challenge establishment conventional wisdom for the bogus nonsense it often was”.
“He was one of Thatcher’s bravest and strongest lieutenants, and a great friend,” Sir David said.
“He had to deal with the agony that the IRA visited on him and his wife, and he did so with characteristic unflinching courage. He was a great man.”
Reform leader Nigel Farage said Lord Tebbit “gave me a lot of help in my early days as an MEP”.
He was “a great man. RIP,” he added.
Lord Tebbit as employment secretary in 1983 with Mrs Thatcher. Pic: PA
Born to working-class parents in north London, he was made a life peer in 1992, where he sat until he retired in 2022.
Lord Tebbit was trade secretary when he was injured in the Provisional IRA’s bombing in Brighton during the Conservative Party conference in 1984.
Five people died in the attack and Lord Tebbit’s wife, Margaret, was left paralysed from the neck down. She died in 2020 at the age of 86.
Before entering politics, his first job, aged 16, was at the Financial Times where he had his first experience of trade unions and vowed to “break the power of the closed shop”.
He then trained as a pilot with the RAF – at one point narrowly escaping from the burning cockpit of a Meteor 8 jet – before becoming the MP for Epping in 1970 then for Chingford in 1974.
Lord Tebbit during an EU debate in the House of Lords in 1997. Pic: PA
As a cabinet minister, he was responsible for legislation that weakened the powers of the trade unions and the closed shop, making him the political embodiment of the Thatcherite ideology that was in full swing.
His tough approach was put to the test when riots erupted in Brixton, south London, against the backdrop of high rates of unemployment and mistrust between the black community and the police.
He was frequently misquoted as having told the unemployed to “get on your bike”, and was often referred to as “Onyerbike” for some time afterwards.
What he actually said was he grew up in the ’30s with an unemployed father who did not riot, “he got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it”.
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