Rishi Sunak needs something superhuman to win the election – this King’s Speech wasn’t it

Rishi Sunak wants to convince the public he is the change candidate, but his first King’s Speech served up meagre rations of innovation and large helpings of more of the same.

With the fewest new Bills in almost a decade, the Prime Minister padded out the speech with lengthy reminders of what he had already done, including repeated references to “continuing” to do things and “delivering” on pledges previously announced.

Billed as the moment the race to next year’s general election started in earnest, this was one of the big set piece chances for Mr Sunak to set the agenda for that contest. Instead, it left the inescapable impression of a Government whose grand plan is to wait and hope for good news on the economy.

Successful election campaigns have two things in common: a story that tells voters their lives are about to improve, and a promise that they will be better off financially. Mr Sunak lacked conviction on both fronts.

There was no mention of any medium-term ambition to cut taxes, and while banning smoking and reforming A-levels are eye-catching policies, they are unlikely to convince the average floating voter that they will have a transformative effect on their lives.

Likewise, promising long-term decisions that will benefit our children and grandchildren is laudable, but it also risks giving people the impression that it will take another generation for the sunlit uplands to arrive.

That was only emphasised by the downbeat opening to the King’s Speech: “The impact of Covid and the war in Ukraine have created significant long-term challenges for the United Kingdom.”

Mr Sunak’s introductory notes had lots of mentions of automated vehicles, digital markets and machine learning, but no voter has identified those as priorities as we head towards an election.

He told voters they were living in “a frontier nation in the tech revolution” that had created “134 tech unicorns”, more than France and Germany combined, which sounds impressive, but how many people will actually understand what he was talking about?

Mr Sunak will, of course, have a Budget before the next election, which will provide the opportunity to talk up the chances of tax cuts in the near future, if not now. He may also want to save his best ideas for the election manifesto, though with such a yawning gap between the Tories and Labour in the polls, many Tory MPs would like to see more evidence of those ideas now.

The Prime Minister’s other task is to draw clear dividing lines between the two parties and in this he was more successful.

A pledge to build a National Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, “doing everything we can to eradicate anti-Semitism”, and a reference to the “barbaric acts of terrorism against the people of Israel” punched the bruise of Labour’s internal divisions over Gaza.

Promising to push ahead with the Rwanda scheme as part of his drive to stop small migrant boats crossing the Channel is also a key point of difference from Labour, though it is a familiar one.

For any prime minister to convince the electorate to give his party a fifth term in office is a superhuman task, and one that has never been achieved before.

To pull off that trick will require something exceptional, and this was not it. Mr Sunak described the King’s Speech as “historic”, but that description only applied to the sex of the person delivering it, rather than the words on the paper in front of him.