Analysis: One year of Rishi Sunak has seen him steady the ship but there's still a sense it's sinking

Rishi Sunak has steadied the ship but MPs still worry it’s sinking.

The Prime Minister took office on October 25, promising to steady the ship after Liz Truss’s disastrous tenure, and pledging to bring respect back to politics.

While the level of scandal has diminished, especially compared to Boris Johnson, there has been no boost in the polling, with experts still predicting Rishi Sunak and the Tories will lose the next election.

Mr Sunak has seen a series of by-election losses, with swings towards Labour representing the biggest in history. MPs are not just worried about losing the next election, there is now real panic over what seats, if any, are still considered safe. Polling expert Sir John Curtice has claimed Labour are on course to win bigger than in 1997, when Tony Blair became Prime Minister.

Speaking to Tory MPs, there remains a belief the Prime Minister can turn it around, with more than one pointing to his five priorities as areas that could convince voters to come back to the Conservatives.

These include halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing the national debt, cutting hospital waiting lists and stopping the boats bringing migrants across the English Channel, all of which are proving difficult to meet.

While most of them are intentionally vague, with Downing Street trying to ensure they don't create targets they miss, inflation is still not on track to fall in time though it has fallen, while stopping the boats has seen the Government agree to a Rwanda scheme that would cost £1.8billion if all 11,000 people who have arrived this year were sent to the country. Mr Sunak’s doubling down on this plan has been a disaster, with the Government facing a battle in the courts over whether the scheme is even legal.The economy is growing, perhaps more weakly than he would have hoped, while the latest official figures showed the national debt stood at almost £2.6 trillion, around 97.8% of GDP, some 2.1 percentage points higher than at the same time last year. Waiting lists have not shortened, with the UK Government blaming strike action.The Conservative leadership attempted to shrug them off as mid-term blips with exceptional local factors at play, but they followed hard on the heels of Selby and Ainsty – another Labour win – and Somerton and Frome, where the Liberal Democrats picked up the seat.

There’s also been an ample amount of chaos, despite commitments to the contrary, with Gavin Williamson and Dominic Raab both resigning over bullying, while Nadhim Zahawi was sacked over his tax affairs. If that wasn’t enough of a car crash metaphor, the Prime Minister also failed to make a long-term decision for a brighter future by uploading a video of himself failing to wear a seat belt, prompting a police fine. If that wasn’t enough, Mr Johnson, Nadine Dorries and a host of other MPs quit the Commons, creating by-elections Mr Sunak would lose or retain by less than a 1000 votes.

One MP insisted the Prime Minister was taking the right approach, and even if things were looking bad, it was still a marked improvement from the chaos before.

They praised Mr Sunak for being on top of his brief, and insisted the issues around polling were “the legacy of Liz Truss”, something that had caused “lasting damage”.

In a sign of just how broken the party was under its two previous leaders, they praised Mr Sunak for letting them get on with being MPs because they no longer had constant emails complaining about the Prime Minister they needed to reply to.They explained: “Because of my view that people who get an email should get a reply, that would take resources away, with me or others dealing with it. It was taking people off coursework, the job of an MP. This, that, or whatever it was, particularly around Dominic Cummings, it was taking up time”.

One Red Wall MP was less supportive, calling on the Prime Minister to “go faster and harder” on areas such as migration, including withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights, and sending all migrants crossing the Channel back to France regardless of their circumstance.

They said: “We know what people want, Boris got it, and if we want to have any chance of winning we’ll start adopting Tory policies again and sticking it to Labour. Immigration is the biggest issue, and we can monster Labour with it”.

For his part, the Prime Minister is more upbeat, following a Conservative conference where he unveiled his new “long-term decisions” approach, promising to bring in a new way of doing politics. He has pointed to his easing of environmental policies, and scrapping HS2 to free up money for other transport schemes, a pledge that would hold up more if most of them hadn’t already been announced or cancelled.However, the relaunch did little to move the dial, and following the latest by-elections, a number of letters are now understood to be sent to the powerful backbench 1922, albeit less than half the amount required to trigger a vote on his leadership. In a sign of how Mr Sunak’s premiership is going, much of the attention at conference was on the potential leadership challengers.

One MP insisted: “There is a unity and just a belief that we only have any chance of winning the next election if we’re getting behind the leader who we have as our Prime Minister. Voters don’t like divided parties”.

Another added: “It’s all gone to s**t but another leader would be even worse”.

The Prime Ministers next chance for a clean slate will come on November 7, when he sets out his vision for the country in the King’s speech, with the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement shortly after on November 22. However, disgruntled MPs aren’t hopeful there will be enough policies to change things anytime soon.One said: “The obvious area to win voters back is tax cuts, but we haven’t sorted inheritance tax, and haven’t begun to hint we’ll do anything massive to put more back into people’s pockets”.Another added: “It feels like Downing Street is just waiting for something to happen, rather than seizing the agenda themselves”.

If Mr Sunak is to see another year in Downing Street and beyond, he must change his party and it’s fortunes soon.