Back in late 2006, James Forsyth was delighted to tell a friend in a Washington bar about his job offer at The Spectator magazine in London and how it would open up an opportunity for him to conquer the world of Westminster politics.
He shared his excitement during the last glory days of a Republican Party-controlled Washington. Some weeks later, the Democratic Party would take over the US Congress in a backlash against George W Bush’s Iraq war. Mr Forsyth returned to London to lead the magazine’s political team, and along the way served as best man at Rishi Sunak’s wedding.
The culmination of his rise to the top in Westminster came at the end of 2022, after Mr Sunak became UK Prime Minister and Mr Forsyth was appointed his political secretary.
One reminder that he had moved between the two codes came after he took the job. He was made to queue up at security check to enter Parliament for a meeting with the Welsh MP Craig Williams. Why were there strict checks for someone so close to power? He explained to the guard that he was waiting for a new pass to enter on his own credentials.
The name Craig Williams came up again just after this year’s UK general election was called – and it will provide us a hefty footnote in the history of the election. It was Mr Williams, as part of Mr Sunak’s inner circle, who was outed as having gambled on the date of the election just before it was announced.
The MP placed a bet on the date, which he recently admitted in a statement. Revelations that he was not the only member of the close-knit teams around the Prime Minister to have done so since dripped out to fatal effect for an already flatlining Conservative campaign.
It is reported that the sums involved for those who have been at the centre of the activity are not huge. It is the decision itself that is being investigated for potential breaches of the law. Using inside knowledge of something to wager is illegal in the UK because of the obvious advantage it delivers.
In the last days of the election campaign, the intensity of any development is heightened. A scandal involving several figures somehow linked to Downing Street is a political mishap of epic standards. What it says to the public is that something badly amiss can be symbolised by the angry headlines.
Already far ahead in the polls, Labour’s Keir Starmer is on the attack, castigating the culture of his rivals. “The instincts of these Tories when a general election is called is not how do we make this work for the country, but how do I make some money?”
As an epithet to lay on a rival in a general election, it is gold dust for Mr Starmer.
Mr Sunak and Mr Forsyth have not been accused of any such malfeasance. Their shared personal ethos seems a million miles from this sort of behaviour. Grasping or grifting is not the persona either man has ever given off. And yet they now own the cyclical decline of the Conservative governing class that has descended through round after round of tarnishing behavioural scandal.
The impact on the polls cannot be anything but negative, even if the 20 per cent threshold of the Conservatives means there is little standing left to lose.
It is important to remember the circumstances in which Mr Sunak rose to the highest executive office in the land in 2022, making him the third UK prime minister in a year. The first fell because social parties in Downing Street were repeatedly held while the rest of the country endured lockdown regulations that imposed fines, in some cases criminal court appearances for illegal gatherings.
Boris Johnson left power in disbelief that it was this behaviour by him and his close team that could have robbed him of high office. The man who had won a majority that rivalled any was being turfed out because of the unleashed behaviour of those around him.
Recklessness of a different sort accounted for Liz Truss, the 49-day comet of a prime minister. Her trashing of how government worked and the process around putting out a budget pushed the Conservatives’ centuries of trust to handle the economy over the proverbial cliff.
Mr Sunak had the task of closing the black hole. He has performed that mission. The finances of the country are not particularly rosy, but they are back on track.
The people running the Conservative government are different. Mr Sunak and Mr Forsyth dispensed with almost all the henchmen of the previous leaders. Yet they were drawing for their own team on the wellspring of a Conservative party exhausted by its time in power. Its hierarchy became an easy framework for operators to climb, greatly guided in their own self-interest.
Eyes on the bigger goals of leading the nation and working within the disciplines of state have obviously atrophied. It is too early to speak of renewal. To be on the right in Washington in 2006 wasn’t even as glum as this.
