he Tories are full of ideas at the moment. They’ve announced three major new policies in the past week. It feels like someone asked Rishi Sunak, “What would you do if you were prime minister?”, and he got really into answering. Then he must have remembered that, weirdly, heprime minister.
The received wisdom is that people get more rightwing as they get older and, with rising life expectancy because of advances in medical science, that’s good news for the right. It’s old people not young ones who are the future, and the triple lock plus is Sunak’s attempt to shore up support from that demographic.
This is an enormously difficult task given the horrendous state of the country. And Sunak’s team must have concluded that it’s actively impossible – indeed that, whatever they do, electoral defeat is inevitable. For me, that is the only logical inference from this absurd flurry of policy announcements: the people around the prime minister are certain that he and the Conservatives will lose the election. If we assume that, their behaviour suddenly makes sense.