Can Rishi Sunak unite his warring party? Five big challenges for the new PM

Published

2 years ago

October 25, 2022

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Will it be the third time lucky this year for the Tories as they embark on their next prime minister?

Rishi Sunak told his colleagues yesterday – painfully aware that their opinion poll ratings are on the floor, if not crashing through the basement – that they must “unite or die”.

Here are five key challenges he faces.

Challenge one: a unity cabinet

Mr Sunak said he would create a cabinet of all the talents, a phrase that is often used but too often falls victim to prime ministers wanting to reward their loyalists.

We’ll see in the coming hours how many of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson‘s supporters make it into the cabinet, with Jeremy Hunt widely expected to stay as chancellor.

One key appointment to watch will be whether Ben Wallace, who clashed with Mr Sunak over defence spending last year and backed Ms Truss because she offered a multibillion-pound increase, will remain in post.

Right-wingers such as Suella Braverman, who threw her backing behind Mr Sunak, will expect jobs but also hold him to promises such as the scheme to send some migrants to Rwanda.

A cabinet that is a broad church means conflict behind closed doors, which can burst into the open – see Theresa May’s time in office. But the Tories want to see all strands of opinion brought in behind Mr Sunak.

Challenge two: balance the books

The fiscal plan to balance the books is still in the diary for next Monday and the Halloween statement is set to be full of horrors. How it lands is a crucial test, especially as the Bank of England makes its decision on interest rates later that week.

A £40bn black hole can only be plugged by spending cuts or tax rises and a mixture of both is expected.

What will be protected? Mr Johnson’s spending review last year promised what was described as a record funding settlement for the NHS – of around 3.8% a year. Inflation, running at 10%, would wipe that away when waiting lists have hit seven million.

Challenge three: the austerity PM

Among the difficult decisions to be made in the coming days is whether pensions and benefits will rise with inflation, or those reliant on them will see a real-terms cut.

Raising benefits by the level of average earnings rather than inflation would save a few billion pounds. But it could destroy a reputation Mr Sunak has traded on since he launched the furlough scheme in March 2020 as someone who protects the most vulnerable.

There could be a heightened risk for Mr Sunak, who is married to a billionaire, of showing he understands the struggles of those on the lowest incomes.

Also coming down the track, and a key consideration when it comes to cuts to departmental budgets, is a wave of strike ballots over public sector pay. Telling nurses and teachers they cannot have a pay rise because the country can’t afford it could be a tougher sell for a prime minister with a gilded lifestyle.

Challenge four: Johnson and internal enemies

What about our former prime minister, who blames Mr Sunak for his downfall?

He tweeted his congratulations to Mr Sunak on Tuesday afternoon and said “this is the moment for every Conservative to give our new PM their full and wholehearted support.

But Mr Johnson, who returned from the Dominican Republic to mount his own leadership campaign, which he claims could have succeeded, threatens to be an alternative power base in the party and perhaps to criticise from the sidelines if parts of his 2019 agenda are dropped.

Mr Sunak inherits an almost 80-seat majority, but all his economic measures will require difficult votes in parliament.

The publicly declared supporters of Mr Johnson and Penny Mordaunt, the Commons leader who also ran in the leadership contest – and not those they claimed to have, make up more than 90 MPs. There is a sizeable pool of unreconciled MPs who could make governing difficult.

Challenge five: is an election on the cards?

As well as having to get the economy back on track, and being Britain’s face on the world stage in dangerous times – something Mr Sunak has limited experience of, given his meteoric rise since he was elected seven years ago – he is relatively untested as a campaigner.

His constituency of Richmond in North Yorkshire is a safe seat and he inherits a Conservative Party seriously damaged by the past few months.

He hopes for another two years before an election and has no obligation to hold one.

But with even some Tory MPs calling for one, and more ominously, Conservative-supporting newspapers pointing out that he walks into Downing Street without a single vote being cast, he may – if it’s a rocky road ahead – struggle with an increasingly loud drumbeat to get a mandate from the public.

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At least 10 dead after fire rips through retirement home in Spain

Published

52 mins ago

November 15, 2024

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At least 10 dead after fire rips through retirement home in Spain

At least 10 people have been killed after a fire broke out at a retirement home in northern Spain in the early hours of this morning, officials have said.

A further two people were seriously injured in the blaze at the residence in the town of Villafranca de Ebro in Zaragoza, according to the Spanish news website Diario Sur.

They remain in a critical condition, while several others received treatment for smoke inhalation.

Firefighters were alerted to the blaze at the residence – the Jardines de Villafranca – at 5am (4am UK time) on Friday.

Those who were killed in the fire died from smoke inhalation, Spanish newspaper Heraldo reported.

The residence is home to 82 elderly residents.

The blaze started in one of the rooms, Fernando Beltran, the national government’s top official in the region, told reporters.

All of the victims were elderly residents, he added.

Fire crews, paramedics and police officers remain on site, said a spokesperson for the regional government of Aragon who confirmed the fatalities.

It took firefighters several hours to extinguish the blaze, they said.

The cause of the fire is unknown and is being investigated.

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COP29: UN climate summits ‘no longer fit for purpose’, warn leading figures

Published

3 hours ago

November 15, 2024

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COP29: UN climate summits 'no longer fit for purpose', warn leading figures

UN climate talks are “no longer fit for purpose” and should only be hosted by countries who are trying to give up fossil fuels, veterans of the process have said.

An open letter to the United Nations, signed by former UN chief Ban Ki-moon, made a dramatic intervention in the 29th COP climate summit, under way in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Frustration over petrostate hosts – following last year’s summit in UAE – as well as the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists, prohibitive costs, and slow progress have been mounting in recent years.

The letter acknowledges the strides COPs have made on ramping up climate policies.

“But it is now clear that the COP is no longer fit for purpose,” the authors said.

“Its current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity.”

The letter’s 22 signatories also include former Ireland President Mary Robinson and Christiana Figueres, former head of the UN climate body (UNFCCC) that runs the annual COP summits.

It called for the process to be streamlined and for countries to be held accountable for their promises.

Sky News analysis has found only “marginal” progress has been made since the “historic” pledge from COP28 last year to transition away from fossil fuels.

COP29 Analysis:
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The letter also called for “strict eligibility criteria” for host countries to exclude those “who do not support the phase out/transition away from fossil energy”.

This year’s host country, petrostate Azerbaijan, has been engulfed in controversy.

Its authoritarian president Ilham Aliyev used his opening address to criticise western hypocrisy and praise oil and gas as a “gift” from God. His criticism of France, with whom relations have long been tense, drove the French minister to cancel a trip to the summit.

While the government and its COP team run separate operations, host countries are supposed to smooth over disagreements and find consensus between the almost 200 countries gathered.

COP presidencies are also nominating themselves to be climate leaders and throwing their own countries under the spotlight.

Azerbaijan is a small developing country that relies significantly on oil and gas revenues. But it has made slow progress on building out clean power – getting just 1.5% of its energy from clean sources – and led a harsh crackdown on critics in the run up to the COP.

In an interview with Sky News on Sunday, its lead negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev was unable to say whether Azerbaijan preferred to extract all its oil and gas or seek another, cleaner economic pathway – hard though that would be.

In a news conference yesterday, Mr Rafiyev said the president had been “quite clear” and he would not comment further.

“We have opened our doors to everybody,” he added.

Some diplomats here have hinted that Azerbaijan’s presidency team mean well but might be a little out of their depth. They have never been out in front at previous COPs, but they also only had a year to prepare for their turn hosting the mighty summit.

“My sense of this is that they’re a little underprepared, a little overwhelmed and a little bit short,” said one, speaking anonymously, as is customary for diplomats trying to maintain good relations.

“But I’m not sure that that’s politics. It might just be bandwidth and preparation and things like that.”

Different regions in the world take turns to host a COP. This year it was up to Eastern Europe, but the selection process took longer than usual due to tensions over Russia’s war in Ukraine and between Azerbaijan and rival Armenia.

Achim Steiner of the UN Development Programme, called it “troubling” that some countries face questions over their host roles.

“Are there countries that are by definition good hosts and others are bad hosts?” he asked.

“In the United Nations, we maintain the principle of every nation, first of all, should have a right to be heard.

“Labels are not always the fairest way of describing a nation. Some of the largest oil producers have hosted this COP in the past, and seemingly this seemed to be a perfectly acceptable phenomenon.”

COP stands for “conference of the parties” and refers to countries (“parties”) who have signed the underlying climate treaty.

Azerbaijan’s COP29 team and the UN’s climate body have been contacted with a request to comment.

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Body pulled from mine after police cut off supplies to ‘smoke out’ thousands of illegal miners

Published

19 hours ago

November 14, 2024

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Body pulled from mine after police cut off supplies to 'smoke out' thousands of illegal miners

A body has been recovered from a South African mine after police cut off basic supplies in an effort to force around 4,000 illegal miners to resurface.

The body has emerged from the closed gold mine in the northwest town of Stilfontein a day after South Africa’s government said it would not help the illegal miners.

Around 20 people have surfaced from the mineshaft this week as police wait nearby to arrest all those appearing from underground.

It comes a day after a cabinet minister said the government was trying to “smoke them [the miners] out”.

The move is part of the police’s “Close the Hole” operation, whereby officers cut off supplies of food, water and other basic necessities to get those who have entered illegally to come out.

Local reports suggest the supply routes were cut off at the mine around two months ago, with relatives of the miners seen in the area as the stand-off continues.

A decomposed body was brought up on Thursday, with pathologists on the scene, police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said.

It comes after South African cabinet minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni told reporters on Wednesday that the government would not send any help to the illegal miners, known in the country as zama zamas, because they are involved in a criminal act.

“We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. Criminals are not to be helped; criminals are to be prosecuted. We didn’t send them there,” Ms Ntshavheni said.

Senior police and defence officials are expected to visit the area on Friday to “reinforce the government’s commitment to bringing this operation to a safe and lawful conclusion”, according to a media advisory from the police.

In the last few weeks, over 1,000 miners have surfaced at various mines in South Africa’s North West province, where police have cut off supplies.

Many of the miners were reported to be weak, hungry and sickly after going for weeks without basic supplies.

Illegal mining remains common in South Africa’s old gold-mining areas, with miners going into closed shafts to dig for any possible remaining deposits.

The illegal miners are often from neighbouring countries, and police say the illegal operations involve larger syndicates that employ the miners.

Their presence in closed mines has also created problems with nearby communities, which complain that the illegal miners commit crimes ranging from robberies to rape.

Illegal mining groups are known to be heavily armed and disputes between rival groups sometimes result in fatal confrontations.