Irish Examiner View: Rishi Sunak will face plenty of problems

New British prime minister Rishi Sunak must draw together a nation hobbled by the incompetence of his predecessors.

Rishi Sunak speaking at the CBI annual dinner at the Brewery in London. Picture: PA

Rishi Sunak has inherited the biggest time bomb in modern British political history. 

As the putative leader of the Conservative Party and by consequence, set to shortly receive the keys to Number 10 Downing Street and the by now-dubious honour of the prime ministership, he faces many, many problems.

The new prime minister is looking to immediately dampen the £40bn ‘black hole’ in the economy and the financial crisis his country was plunged into by his predecessor, Liz Truss. He needs to grasp the nettle of a crippling hike in the cost of living and the prospect of fuel poverty for millions of Britons without delay and try and fight off strident opposition calls for a snap general election.

On top of that, he is facing the fallout from the war in Ukraine and turmoil within the NHS and will have to address the myriad transport strikes which have hobbled the country for months; then there is the public service crisis — aside altogether from that within the NHS — as teachers, university lecturers, civil servants, and many, many others, seek pay rises to at least keep them in parity with the cost of living.

He needs to make speedy decisions on social welfare benefits as millions face battles to feed themselves and heat and pay for their homes, and make a call on raising taxes to pay for it. And, as if all that wasn’t enough, he also needs to put to bed the ongoing rows over the Northern Ireland Protocol, raise pension funding, tackle Britain’s crippling defence spending bill, and focus on planning reform, immigration, and foreign aid.

Importantly, he needs to quickly unite a Tory party riven by factional in-fighting and face up to a forthcoming parliamentary inquiry into another predecessor, Boris Johnson, which is likely to reignite public anger over the behaviour of those in power during the Covid pandemic and further taint the already problematic issue of Conservative integrity.

He has, then, a rather full in-tray, and it will be a measure of the man if he can draw together a nation hobbled by the incompetence of his predecessors. His wooden and brief acceptance speech promised governance driven by “integrity and humility”, but that pledge is in itself meaningless without true leadership. 

The world awaits any sign of that — as do his millions of citizens — and might also like to see some dignity and decorum emanating from a once great country.