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Rishi Sunak raised eyebrows in October when he pitched himself to Conservative activists at his party’s annual conference as the "change” candidate despite the Tories ruling for the past 13 years. That no longer appears to be the plan.
Just three months after that speech, in which Sunak railed against the politics of the past 30 years and said he wanted to "lead in a different way” in order to "create the sort of change” voters wanted, the prime minister has once again reset his approach.
The switch, from calling for bold change to urging voters to stick with the status quo, represents an evolution of the thinking among Sunak’s aides, a Conservative official said, requesting anonymity while discussing party tactics.
"We should stick with the plan,” Sunak told members of the public at a question and answer session in Lancashire, north-west England, on Monday. Voting Tory offers "peace of mind,” he argued, while the opposition Labour Party would take the country "back to square one.”
Sunak’s strategy matters because he’s planning to hold a general election in the second half of the year, and is trying to make up a polling deficit on the opposition Labour Party that’s fluctuated around 20 points for months.
But the constant pivots also suggest the ruling party is unsure how to fight the vote.
"There have been too many relaunches,” said John McTernan, a former adviser to Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and strategist for BCW Global. Sunak’s "political radar is all over the place,” he added.
Sunak has tried a number of different approaches to his political strategy over the last year.
He began 2023 trying to distance himself from the turmoil of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss administrations, unveiling five pledges on the economy, health service and immigration that were designed to restore the public’s trust in the Tory party.
His mantra over the summer was to stick with that plan and hammer home those five pledges.
Yet as the stubborn polling gap with Keir Starmer’s Labour refused to close, Sunak rolled the dice last summer with more populist, right-wing rhetoric on the net zero agenda, migrants and so-called culture war issues.
When that failed to move the dial, he presented himself at the October Tory convention as an agent of change willing to make major decisions on policies such as scrapping an expensive high-speed rail line and banning smoking for future generations.
"We’ve had thirty years of a political system which incentivizes the easy decision, not the right one,” he told the Tory conference, citing a period during which his party had been in charge for more than half the time. "Thirty years of vested interests standing in the way of change.”
Then, just a month later, Sunak surprised his party with a switch toward the political center, contradicting that "change” message by bringing back former prime minister David Cameron as his foreign secretary in a Cabinet reshuffle. Cameron had been in charge for six of the 30 years Sunak had criticized.
Sunak started off a year ago with "a relatively sensible strategy” of pursuing five pledges devised by Australian adviser Isaac Levido, according to McTernan, who added: "Then they panicked last summer and threw five or six different things at the wall. We had spreadsheet Rishi, anti net zero Rishi, tech bro Rishi, I’m the change Rishi, Cameroon Rishi.”
Sunak and his advisers have now decided on a more traditional Tory strategy for the election campaign. He will argue he has made some progress on his pledges and that the situation for Britons is starting to change for the better.
If the country sticks to his plan for the economy then the Conservatives can deliver a brighter long-term future, the official said. Alternatively, the Tories will argue, a vote for Labour is a risk.
That follows the playbook used by another Australian Tory election strategist, Lynton Crosby, who ran a series of campaigns in Britain under successive Conservative leaders. Levido is a former employee of Crosby.
In 2015, Crosby masterminded Cameron’s winning general election campaign with a tightly-controlled message that the Tories offered "stability” and a "clear economic plan” for the long-term, while stoking fears that a Labour government would mean a "coalition of chaos” with the Scottish National Party.
However, another Tory strategist warned that a safety-first campaign based on Crosby-style principles may not be enough to turn the polls around.
Voters were unlikely to decide they wanted more of the same and the Tory election campaign should adopt more radical policies on the economy and immigration to try to shake up the current prevailing narrative that Labour is on course for power, they argued.
