It was always going to be a tricky week for Rishi Sunak.
Monday’s debate on the privileges committee’s report on Boris Johnson’s partygate lies dragged an issue the prime minister would rather forget back into the centre of British politics.
Wednesday’s update from the Office for National Statistics on the rate of inflation was also fraught with danger, and would have a direct impact on Thursday’s interest rates decision by the Bank of England.
As it turned out, all three events could hardly have gone worse for the PM – and fed into a growing sense among Tory MPs that the flicker of hope they felt when Sunak entered Number 10 has been well and truly extinguished.
“A couple of months ago I’d have said we could stop Labour getting a majority, but I don’t think that now,” one gloomy former cabinet minister told HuffPost UK.
The air of despondency among the Conservative ranks is not helped by a series of mis-steps by Sunak himself.
Ahead of the Johnson debate, the prime minister took a Trappist approach by refusing to say what he made of the privileges committee’s damning verdict on his predecessor.
In a bizarre interview, Sunak said he “wouldn’t want to influence anyone” who was – unlike him – planning to vote on it in the Commons later that day.
Despite 118 Tory MPs – including eight cabinet ministers – trooping through the lobbies to back the committee, Sunak claimed to have an important charity dinner event that he simply could not miss and body-swerved the vote.
Even when he did eventually break his silence, his condemnation of Johnson’s behaviour was as weak as it could possibly be, giving the impression that he remains unable to emerge from his considerable shadow.
Two days later came confirmation from the ONS that Sunak’s promise to halve inflation to around 5% by the end of the year is looking increasingly forlorn, as they revealed that the rate in May – just as in April – was 8.7%.
That grim data undoubtedly influenced the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, which decided to hike interest rates by half a percentage point to 5% the following day, meaning more misery for hard-pressed mortgage-holders.
“A couple of months ago I’d have said we could stop Labour getting a majority, but I don’t think that now”
In an attempt to demonstrate to voters that he remained in control, Sunak told IKEA staff at a PM Connect event in Dartford that he was “100% on it”. The blank stares from his audience spoke volumes.
One Tory aide said: “If he’s trying to be comforting then it’s not working. The only people I’ve heard saying ‘I’m on it’ were normally drunk or a cast member of Geordie Shore.”
And it’s not just on inflation that the government is floundering. On each of the PM’s other four priorities – growing the economy, reducing debt, cutting NHS waiting lists and stopping the Channel crossings by asylum seekers – there is little-to-no sign of progress.
One veteran Tory backbencher said the rot had truly set in with the party’s disastrous local election performance at the beginning of last month, when they exceeded even their own worst fears by losing more than 1,000 seats.
“I was reasonably optimistic going into those, but we’ve really been on a downward spiral since then,” he said.
“People’s morale was reasonably good, Rishi had come in and professionalised everything. Things were better than they had been, but since those elections nothing’s really gone right.”
A former minister said soaring mortgage rates are “a killer” for the Tories.
He said: “No government has ever won an election if they don’t have the support of the majority of mortgage holders.
“Our message to voters now seems to be Labour will be worse, but at least in 1997 we could say we’d rescued the economy and Labour would trash it.
“The problem now is that the economy’s in a mess and we’ve run out of time to fix it.
“We just have to hope that something unidentified turns up, like an alien invasion. It’s not a great strategy but that’s where we are now. Most colleagues understand that the die is cast.”
Even more worryingly for the Tories, all of the recent opinion polls show that Labour’s already-healthy lead is increasing. With four crucial by-elections in England on the horizon, this is not good news.
One senior Conservative MP said the next general election is all about damage limitation for the party.
“The important thing is we get the maximum number of MPs we can so we’re an effective opposition that come back in 5 years,” he said.
The idea that the Tories could possibly still be in power after the election is “fanciful”, the MP added.
Labour, meanwhile, can barely believe their luck at Sunak’s cack-handed approach to politics.
A party source said: “He started the week with nothing to say about Boris Johnson and finished it with nothing to say about the latest Tory economic crisis.
“At least he’s living up to one promise – that he ‘doesn’t want to influence anything’.”