The PM asked us to judge him by his five priorities - so let's
It is usually left to voters to decide how to judge our politicians. We make our minds up based on a range of measures: how they come across in interviews and speeches, what their policies and values are, whether their time in power has made us better or worse off.
The speech was an audacious bid by Sunak’s team to have the new Prime Minister judged on his own terms – a luxury not afforded to many politicians. He would not be able to fix everything that needed fixing, they warned us: the pledges contain no mention of education, crime, social care, housing or defence. But these were specific criteria on which Sunak would focus his efforts and on which, as he put it, “I ask you to judge us”.
This attempt to set the terms of his own success was not without risk: it gave voters, and the media, clear metrics for what should be classed as success and what as failure. In trying to frame how he should be judged, Sunak boxed himself in: regardless of what other successes he secured, or what else happened during his tenure, he had created the prism through which voters would look at his time in office.
Being generous, one might say that the Government’s spending constraint and rejection of above-inflation pay rises for public sector workers may have helped, but largely it was a global phenomenon. On the other four promises, the PM’s performance varies from “major improvement needed” to “spectacular failure”.Then there is the NHS backlog, which stood at 7.21 million when that pledge was made. It is now 7.58 million.
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