Three things Rishi Sunak MUST do to make sure he keeps his job in 2023, according to top polling expert

IF he wasn’t teetotal, Rishi Sunak might be tempted to pour himself a stiff drink when he sits down to make his New Year resolutions.

Amid the strikes, the inflation, the chaos in the Channel and the cost-of-living crisis, the Prime Minister and the Conservative Party are ending 2022 battered and bruised.

In the polls they are averaging just 25 per cent and heading toward an election wipeout.

Labour is now the most trusted party on the economy, the NHS and immigration, the three top issues for voters.

As I warned Conservative MPs this week, in all my years as an academic and pollster I have simply never seen the country as fed-up, exasperated and disillusioned as they are today.

Most people now think “nothing is really working in Britain”.

They expect the future to be even worse and do not really believe anybody in Westminster has the answers.

So how can Sunak turn things around and do the political equivalent of saving the Titanic?

If I were advising him, I’d tell him to put three things at the top of his list.

First, after the hapless Liz Truss blew a big hole in the Conservative’s reputation for economic credibility, Sunak needs to continue to work fast to plug it.

There are already some tentative signs this is happening.

Sunak was among the first to warn about inflation and, this week, experts suggested it has finally peaked and should now begin to fall throughout 2023.

If it does, and so long as Sunak stands firm against the unions and their unrealistic wage demands, he will inch closer to what I expect will be his key attack line at the next election.

“Prices and interest rates are now coming down”, he will say, “the worst is behind us, don’t let Keir Starmer and Labour ruin it”.

But for this message to be convincing he will also need to show progress when it comes to tackling the deeper problems holding Britain back.

The country’s glaring lack of productivity, the failure of a long line of Prime Ministers to incentivise private companies to invest in Britain, and to deliver on the promise of levelling-up the country, which still appeals strongly to voters, all needs to be prioritised.

So too does reforming the NHS.

There’s no point just throwing money at the broken NHS, Sunak needs to get ahead of the debate by outlining a bold new plan to reform it, to make it more efficient, otherwise Starmer will.

Doing all this will help Sunak address his second big challenge — he MUST win back the working-class Brexit voters who were central to Boris Johnson’s victory but are now running for the hills, disillusioned with the highest tax burden since the 1950s and wondering why they still have no control over their own borders.

Since Boris Johnson came to power in 2019, the share of working-class voters who plan to vote Tory has collapsed from 51 per cent to just 26 per cent, while the share of Brexit voters who have stayed loyal has also slumped, from 76 per cent to just 44 per cent.

These voters were promised a low-tax, low-immigration, high-growth economy but they have so far been given the opposite: A high-tax, high-immigration, low-growth economy.

Regaining control over our borders would be a good place to start.

The immigration and asylum system is now a complete shambles.

Contrary to the promise of lower immigration, net migration this year surged to a new record of 504,000, while the small boats in the Channel are a powerful symbol of this loss of control.

And voters have clearly noticed.

In my own polling, close to two-thirds say “Britain has lost control of its borders” while immigration is now their third priority — behind the economy and the broken NHS.

Sunak has certainly made a promising start by introducing reforms to help clear the backlog in the hopelessly inefficient Home Office, launch a bespoke deal to return Albanians and throwing more money and patrols at the Channel.

But he will need to go much further, reforming modern slavery legislation so it cannot be abused by ruthless people traffickers and introducing new laws to make it clear that anybody who arrives in Britain illegally cannot stay.

I suspect he will also have to look again at Britain’s relationship with the European Convention on Human Rights so that, finally, Britain, not the European courts, can decide whether or not it wants to deport foreign criminals and take control of its borders.

Strong push back

Which brings me to resolution number three.

The year 2022 will go down in the history books as the year of three prime ministers, with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak.

Ask voters which of these Prime Ministers was best and they don’t see Rishi Sunak — they say Boris Johnson.

There is a reason for this.

Johnson might have made mistakes but he brought a big dose of boosterism to the country, an unabashed belief in Britain rarely voiced by our depressing and defeatist political class.

It was also a strong push back to the dreary woke narrative that everything here is terrible, backward, and racist.

But most voters don’t think like this.

Most voters don’t want to be told over and over again what is wrong with their home.

Sunak should resolve to enter 2023 by embracing the very best of Boris and Britain, making clear to the country why he believes it is among the very best places to live on the planet.

And if he does all these things he might not only find the people thank him for it but might even be tempted to crack out the champagne.