Dear, oh dear, oh dear!  We all tried to give the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, the benefit of the doubt and now the jury is back, any lingering doubts that the man was politically incompetent, have been reassuringly, eliminated.

It’s like lending someone your very valuable, classic car, in pristine condition and despite the assurances that the driver is highly experienced, he smashes the car into a wall and brings it back in twelve shopping bags and says sorry.

No one forgot that he was ‘et tu brute’ when he ‘knifed’ Boris and failing to beat Liz Truss after the hustings should have given us a signal that his diminutive figure was so, in many other respects.

Foinavon moment

Here was a perfectly decent provincial accountant who through a ‘Foinavon moment’ (Foinavon being the unlikely 100/1 winner of the Grand National in1967 when most of the other front runners fell) was catapulted by circumstance, to the ‘top job’ in British politics and evidently, he just couldn’t hack it!

He surrounded himself with a cabal of young ‘wet behind the ears’ inexperienced advisors such as Liam Booth-Smith, James Forsyth and Craig Williams, the latter of whom, injudiciously, couldn’t resist a flutter on the surprise Election date, in-order-to make a few bent coppers.  How foolish was he.

Clearly, the plain vanilla combination of Sunak and Hunt, with their ‘steady as she goes’ political direction, was far too pedestrian and timid, to excite the electorate.

The Tory Party were behind Labour by six percent when the former Prime Minister Truss was booted out and Sunak turned that into a persistent twenty percent gap, which never narrowed during the pre-election period, which is unprecedented.

Pork chop at a Bar Mitzvah

Even the poisoned, ‘political pigmy’, Jeremy Corbyn, managed to gain nine percent on Theresa May before the 2017 Election, and this was despite him effectively being a ‘pork chop at a Bar Mitzvah’ to the bulk of the electorate.

We should have taken more note of the signs at the 2023 Tory Party conference, where Sunak’s flagship policies were anti-smoking and a new school’s curricula. His empty rhetoric of being the ‘candidate for change’ went down like a ‘Lead balloon’. Maybe somebody needed to remind him that after thirteen years in power, the last thing that you can represent is being a ‘paragon of new thinking’.

Pull up the drawbridge on inward investment

His ineptitude in dealing with the major issues facing this country was staggering i.e., reducing the housing quota, failing to deal with Nimbyism, weak to worthless immigration policy, not properly implemented, and he always struggled with the treatment delays of the NHS.

His tax hikes on Corporation Tax, Non-Dom reforms, no VAT reclaim, effectively served to pull up the drawbridge on inward investment.  He was timid when he should have been bold and as for the decision to call an early Election, was foolish beyond belief.

What’s the point in moving from fixed election periods to then studiously lose out on good news on inflation, UK growth and the chance to have a ‘last hoorah’ with an autumn Budget which could have thrown a few sweeties to the Tory faithful.

A later Election would have distracted Mr. Farage and the Reform Party, whilst he helped his pal President Trump with the November Election in the USA.

Reducing Labour landslide

Whilst he was never going to win the UK Election, he could have had a chance to reduce the Labour landslide from two terms to one.

He ignored the wise counsel of Isaac Levido and irritated a hundred and fifty so of his MPs who were not in place for the early Election date.

The Tory coffers were threadbare, and the only donations were from supporter’s hopeful of gaining a ‘gong’.

And, as for his absence at the D-Day photo-call, words fail us, it was such an obvious own goal and greatly irritated the ‘grey votes’ which his party needed so badly.

Despite the unaffordable cost of lowering National Insurance Tax, he was still banging on about it when no one really cared, and would have preferred the money to be re-directed to the NHS and education.

The Tory MPs did not cover themselves in glory, but most would agree that had Boris taken proper ownership of ‘Party gate’ and continued as Prime Minister, there would have been a hung parliament and not a drubbing at the Election, since he is ‘catnip’ to the red wall voters.

Worst Tory result in over one hundred years

Sunak presided over the worst Tory result in over one hundred years and needlessly lost two thirds of his MPs. At least Moses found a ford across the Nile to lead the Israelites to safety.

Eddy the Eagle

We were hoping that Sunak would be the Montgomery of British generals but instead he was Eddy the Eagle and displaced former Tory MPs are baying for his blood.

Kemi Badenoch was absolutely right to give the former PM a dressing down at the first shadow party’s cabinet meeting, but then again, it is the price you pay for ruining people’s lives and for discovering, when it’s too late, that you are not up to the job.

Badenoch has the stamina to hold the rump of the Party

Mr. Sunak you can rightly hang your head in shame and although it is a long, winding road for the Tory’s to recover their momentum, I hope that someone like Badenoch has the stamina to hold the rump of the Party together over one or two electoral terms.

The only hope for the Tory’s is that Starmer’s success is broad, but thin, and it wouldn’t take much of a seismic shift to redress the balance in favour of the Tory’s.

All we can hope for is that Tony Blair continues to mentor Mr. Starmer and avoid the pressure from Angela Raynor and her cohorts, to lurch to the left.

Market commentary must be so confusing for ‘the man on the Clapham
omnibus’. If I’m confused, and I have been in the business for fifty years, what
hope is there for the un-initiated?

It is good news indeed that the overall inflation rate has come down to 2.3%
(announced May 22nd) and the IMF are predicting three interest rate reductions,
which means that the mortgage interest rate trend will be moving south, and this
is good news for the Residential Property Market. Continue reading →