'The one thing Rishi Sunak did wrong which proves why he's about to lose power'
A pandemic. A party fighting like cats in a sack. Mobile phones that mysteriously delete themselves, and then evaporate in a puff of forgetfulness.
There are lots of things which will be blamed for spelling the end of Rishi Sunak, and there'll be TV debates and dinner tables where someone will say "well, he was very unlucky, what would you have done".
Being the fifth-worst Prime Minister in 7 years and forced to fix every problem your predecessors had to resign for is no easy gig. A Formula 1 pit crew would struggle to keep the wheels on the Tory charabanc while it's doing racist doughnuts in an international shipping lane. Rishi was always going to find it a slog.
But he had one very easy problem on his desk, right next to the solution. It was cheap, score him a big political win, and with no effort on his part gift him positive headlines and a long-term legacy that could forever outweigh the rest. And it is how he fluffed THAT up in an unforced, and unnoticed error, which explains why Sunak is on his way out of the door.
Or sinking into the carpet, depending on your perspective (Getty Images)Sunak took office on October 25, 2022. He was immediately faced with a financial crisis courtesy of his predecessor Liz Truss, unending sleaze thanks to his former boss Boris Johnson, and the unmeetable demands of Suella Braverman. And in under a month, he scored a win on something else entirely.
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On November 21 he announced a medal for Britain's nuclear test veterans, a largely-forgotten group of heroes who have spent decades fighting governments of all sorts for recognition and compensation. It was something he'd done zero work to achieve but was able to claim for himself, and it earned him glowing reviews.
And it mattered to Sunak. I was there when he made the medal announcement at a commemorative event, and watched his face as, among the families listening, a sigh of relief left 100 heavy hearts, followed by a ripple of applause. Sunak stumbled in his speech, looked up, did a double-take, and was clearly both moved and surprised that this easy goal, on his part, had produced such a reaction.
One of the veteran's granddaughters asked for a private meeting to discuss more work they needed to be done, and he agreed. Then he left, and in the year since refused to meet them, told that same granddaughter he was too busy, and seems to have allowed his government to block the delivery of that same medal. You have to work hard to disappoint people that thoroughly. Then he was gifted an absolute banger of a problem he could make for someone else: the nuked blood scandal.
"Now, I know I've heard of that somewhere before..." (No 10 Downing Street / BEEM)In Parliament and in private, in personal letters and Commons questions, in emails and text messages, both Sunak and his personal office have been updated for the past year about the Mirror's investigation into how Britain ordered blood and urine tests from its own servicemen, analysed the results, and then mysteriously lost them.
They have seen the growing bundle of archive documents proving thousands of tests were ordered, discussed, arranged, and made part of the Ministry of Defence's bureaucratic machinery for 15 years during the Cold War radioactive experiments it conducted in America, Australia and the South Pacific. They have been told of case after case after case of veterans or next of kin who have found their medical files missing, destroyed, partially deleted or entirely withheld.
They were given early sight of every published article on the blood tests we found, on confirmation they existed and official refusal to supply them to families, on Opposition accusations of crimes by the state, and a new legal case set up to sue the MoD for the mental trauma of withholding the truth from thousands of service families.
There was a steady drumbeat, for months, of impending bad news - that the Mirror might find the files, that Labour would make hay with it, that things were looking a bit sticky. Some of his own ministers were getting sucked into the scandal, and his troublesome backbenchers were making noises.
It may not have mattered as much to so many people quite as much as, for example, the HS2 high-speed rail link. But he could have overlooked the train line and taken minimal flak for it, and instead chose to not just close the project but sell back purchased land and redesigning Euston station to make life more difficult and expensive for the incoming Labour government.
He has done it with the compensation packages demanded by the infected blood inquiry, delaying it for months and kicking the multi-billion-pound bill into Labour's half, so that Rachel Reeves has to find the money, and not Jeremy Hunt.
And he could have done it with the nuked blood scandal. Labour has pledged compensation and full transparency on those missing medical records. If Sunak promised them an apology, inquiry, or future restitution he could give another headache to Keir Starmer; win plaudits from all sides of the media, especially more Right wing papers which consider themselves the voice of Our Boys or their officers; unite his party, for however brief a period; and ensure that his legacy as PM would forever include one unarguable positive.
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Instead, the medal he announced was designed in late March, but not sent to the King to approve until June. Production didn't begin until August and, with more than 3,700 applied for, hundreds were not made in time for Remembrance. As I write, 57 are still waiting to see if they get it for Christmas, along with more than 1,200 for widows and children. Among them were dozens of veterans who died, waiting to hold what Sunak had promised them.
Despite being asked on the day of the announcement for a reception with His Majesty the King to present it, his government did nothing to make it happen. Instead, a fortnight after Remembrance, 50 veterans were invited to London for an "official reception". Many were too frail or pissed off to go, and extras were added at the last minute to bump up numbers. In the end, there were around 30. They travelled for hours, with an average age of 86, for a 40 minute gathering. Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, junior defence minister Andrew Murrison, and Veterans Affairs Minister Johnny Mercer were the only dignitaries present. No veteran was invited to speak, the media was banned, and the coffee was cold.
Former Royal Engineer Peter Frost, 86, paid for a taxi all the way from Burnham-on-Crouch on the Essex coast. "My medal was delivered by the postman. I found it by the dustbin," he said. "Shapps acted like the 'great I am'. I had a go at them about how long the medal had taken, and they acted like we should be grateful to have it at all. They couldn't care less about us."
No minister asked, so none knew, that Peter was a former Met policeman; that he maintained generators on Christmas Island during repeated H-bomb tests in 1958; nor that he had a son born with a deformed foot, and a miscarried grandchild, and a daughter with kidney problems. Some veterans at the event were glad to have been invited, but none felt valued. Former army laundryman John Morris said Mercer was the only minister to make an effort to speak to those in the room, while Shapps "ran away as soon as he could". He added: "It was rubbish."
John Morris, standing, and Peter Frost, seated closest to the door, were unimpressed by the event
Only veterans - no widows of the 20,000 who've already died - were invited, and the media were bannedThis was one, tiny bit of formal entertaining. And it would have been a lot to expect the veterans to be hosted in the Buckingham Palace state dining room with the gold cutlery. But more could have been done, requiring very little effort for a much greater return, and it didn't happen because Rishi Sunak had no idea it was worth doing.
He had no clue that there was an easy political win here. No moral sense that more was required. No hard-hearted calculation about how to make himself look good, and for a man surprised anyone wanted the medal, no retained memory that it mattered.
Yes, other stuff is on his desk. His working day is a nightmare and his colleagues are in a collective fever dream in which Boris Johnson is the solution, rather than the underlying cause. But even a man as amoral, incompetent, and fundamentally self-pleasuring as Johnson was able to meet these men, hear their case, ask where the blood tests were, and order the medal. Someone who is less like Johnson should be more able to take the next step: Sunak couldn't even see it.
He lacks political ruthlessness, and the awareness of how government grinds ordinary people to dust unless someone at the top takes a personal interest in stopping it. In private and in public, Sunak has shown a total inability to compute that these men needed their medal quick, with a fuss, with their medical records on the side. The praise could have been his, and the price paid by someone else.
He can't imagine how it feels to be them, in the same way he doesn't have any way to know how it feels to be you, or to lose, or to fail, or to be poor, or desperate, or hungry, or overlooked. Which is why the second big surprise of his premiership will be when he is fired by his own party. He will wonder what went wrong, and probably never understand it. The rest of us can see how he turned potential victory into embarrassing failure with the nuclear test veterans, and know he wrote his own epitaph.
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