On September 8 a rare calm descended on British politics as news filtered to London from the Scottish Highlands that Queen Elizabeth was on her deathbed. It was a moment of stillness in a year of wild upheaval.
At the end of a 2022 in which Britain had one disastrous mini-Budget, two monarchs, three prime ministers and four chancellors, the question arises: what — aside from the extraordinary cast changes — has actually changed?
Rishi Sunak’s arrival in Number 10 in October marked the culmination of a period of extreme turbulence — the fifth prime minister since the 2016 Brexit vote. Before that vote there had been only five premiers since 1979.
Sunak’s lower key approach to governing — described as his allies as “show, don’t tell” — gave Britain a respite from politics, but many observers believe the events of 2022 have caused a big shift in the political landscape.
“There has been a sea change in the position of the parties,” said Anthony Wells, head of political research at YouGov. “It’s probably going to be the year when the Tories lost the next election. It’s hard to see how they can win a majority next time.”
Sunak hopes he can reap what his allies call “a dullness dividend” and that competent economic management and a recovery from recession could make the Tories “competitive” before an election expected in late 2024.
But the latest YouGov poll shows the damage the Tories have suffered in the past year. It gives Labour a 25-point lead over the Conservatives, suggesting that Sunak — grappling with a wave of strikes — has not yet clawed back much of the ground lost by his predecessors.
For Wells, a key change in 2022 was that the voters looked at the shambles of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss premierships, the disastrous handling of the economy and the endless infighting and concluded the game was up for the Conservatives.
“The polls show the public expect a Labour government next time,” he said. “In its own way, that drives everything else. They look at Keir Starmer as the next prime minister.” For a Labour leader previously struggling to make an impact with the public, that perception matters.
The trauma of 2022, according to political analysts, also marked a high water mark for the populist surge that manifested itself in the Brexit vote and saw its zenith under Johnson and Truss — who tried to run against the “establishment” they claimed was holding Britain back.
John McTernan, a political strategist and former adviser to Tony Blair, said: “I think this was the year of reality and material facts. Material facts are quite problematic for populists.”
He points to the rise of centrist pragmatists like Joe Biden in the US, Olaf Scholz in Germany and Anthony Albanese in Australia as evidence of a broader trend: “They may be dull, but they have a plan.”
Sunak and Starmer fit into a similar mould, offering voters unflashy stability. “We’ve probably reached the end of this idea that you can govern just by changing the prime minister, chancellor or home secretary every few months,” McTernan said.
Katie Perrior, a former adviser to Theresa May, agreed: “It’s the end of the populist idea that you can just throw out ideas and not care about how you’re going to pay for it.”
McTernan reckons that Starmer, a “still point in the turning world of British politics”, will be the ultimate beneficiary of this trend and Perrior agrees that business can sense a change in the direction of the political wind.
“This was the year that the relationship between business and Labour changed dramatically,” she said. The opposition party’s conference in Liverpool this year saw a sharp increase in the number of suits in evidence on the fringes and hotel bars.
David Lidington, former deputy prime minister in May’s government, also believes Britain is moving into a less erratic phase when it comes to foreign policy, ushered in by Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Ukraine.
Lidington argues the Ukraine crisis “clearly had an impact that runs deep in British society”, citing the yellow and blue flags seen across the country and the willingness of British families to host refugees from the conflict.
This renewed focus on the need to defend western values and security in Europe coincided in 2022 with a shift in the debate on Brexit, Lidington argues, which could open the way to more harmonious and practical relations with the EU in the years ahead.
“The majority of people now accept, however they voted, that Brexit has not delivered a land of milk and honey,” he said. Lord Michael Heseltine, the former Tory cabinet minister went further: “There came a moment a few months ago when people started admitting that Brexit was a disaster.”
Polls suggest a growing number of people regret the Brexit vote and the economic data confirm the hit to the economy, but the fact that none of the main parties wants to even discuss rejoining the single market or the EU itself has taken some of the heat out of the issue.
Lidington said that Johnson’s ousting from Number 10 marked a watershed, allowing European leaders to start trying to repair the damage and forge a new partnership in a less toxic atmosphere.
“European politics can now be discussed without reference to 2016,” he said. “He has moved on and we have moved on.” Lidington says he recently attended a UK-Germany forum where Brexit was “rarely mentioned”; the focus instead was on Ukraine, Russia, climate, energy and China.
The events of 2022 also raised a profound question for Sunak: what are the Conservatives for? After a decade of anaemic growth and growing demands on public services, Tory prime ministers have been forced to put up taxes to their highest postwar levels and the state has grown.
Johnson and Truss tried their best over a number of years to blame others for Britain’s predicament: the EU, the judiciary, civil servants, parliament, the BBC, the Treasury, the Bank of England, even people with “North London town houses” and podcasts.
Meanwhile Truss’s experiment with radical tax cutting and deregulation ran into a wall of public opposition. Indeed public support for striking nurses — two-thirds of voters back their industrial action — suggests the public favour more investment in a crumbling public realm rather than less.
The easiest free-market routes to promote growth, such as increasing immigration, relaxing planning laws or rejoining the EU’s vast single market have been rejected by Sunak, under pressure from his own MPs.
In fact 2022 proved beyond any doubt that there are no quick fixes to Britain’s problems and that the public are fed up with politicians shifting the blame. Sunak and Starmer will now have to live with that uncomfortable legacy.
