Voters Don’t Trust ‘Straight-Talking’ Rishi Sunak to Tell the Truth

The Prime Minister's dishonest tactics are undermining what remains of public trust in him and his party

“Sunak’s straight-talking battle against political ‘fairytales’ has only just begun” according to the Editor of the Spectator, Fraser Nelson, who claimed this week that the Prime Minister “thinks voters will reward him for confronting hard truths.”

It’s unclear what “straight-talking” Nelson is referring to here, because anyone making an honest assessment of Sunak’s recent behaviour will have seen something quite different.

In fact far from taking a refreshingly honest approach, the Prime Minister has instead engaged in increasingly deceptive political practices.

The most obvious example of this came in the past two weeks when Sunak went from insisting that he was 100% committed to building HS2 to Manchester, to secretly planning to announce that he would scrap the plans, to then scrapping his announcement once it was leaked, and then refusing to discuss the matter further.

A similar lack of straight-talking was evident in the PM’s recent decision to scrap his planned 2030 ban on the sale of diesel and petrol cars, despite promising car companies just days before that he remained committed to it.

His U-turn was accompanied by an even more dishonest speech in which the Prime Minister claimed to have scrapped a series of policies, including a “tax on meat” which had existed only inside the heads of his own speechwriters.

In fact far from confronting the electorate with a series of “hard truths”, Sunak instead appears intent on creating exactly the sort of “political fairytales” that Nelson claims he is standing against.