Why Rishi Sunak ought to regard the coming of 2023 with more optimism than previously - Andrew Vine

He then went from hero to zero in the eyes of many Tory activists, getting the blame for knifing a Prime Minister who had won a landslide election victory.

That saw Mr Sunak rejected as party leader and banished to the back benches with no hope of political redemption by his rival, Liz Truss, his frontline career in government apparently finished at only 42.

Then less than three months later he was entering Downing Street, making history as the country’s first British Asian Prime Minister and facing the monumental task of clearing up the mess bequeathed by a predecessor who did immense damage to the economy in her few short weeks in office.

It’s hard to recall another politician of modern times who endured such a switchback year of changing fortunes.

Throw in a fine for breaching Covid restrictions and an embarrassing controversy over his wife’s tax affairs, and Mr Sunak must view 2022 with very mixed emotions.

And even if he gets a few relatively uninterrupted days off, the backdrop to Christmas is grim, with the worst wave of industrial unrest for more than 40 years and war being waged on Ukraine by Russia with renewed ferocity.

Nor is there any end in sight to the cost of living crisis. The New Year will see tax rises and cuts to public spending start to make people’s lives even more difficult.

The outlook for Mr Sunak’s party is gloomy, with Labour maintaining a solid lead in the opinion polls and seemingly on course for an election victory in 2024.

There is every likelihood that the red wall seats of Yorkshire, which fell to the Tories in 2019, will return to their traditional Labour allegiance because the much-vaunted promises of economic levelling-up after decades of under-investment turned out to be nothing more than hot air.

And there was more bad news for the Conservatives last week, with polling from the Fabian Society and YouGov pointing to the party losing 108 of its coastal seats because voters do not believe it understands their problems.

In Yorkshire, those problems have long been apparent in Whitby, Scarborough and Bridlington, where the summer crowds of visitors obscure a reality of left-behind communities suffering from deep-seated poverty and a lack of opportunities for young people.

It isn’t just Labour that Mr Sunak needs to worry about. His own MPs are too often a fractious rabble, seemingly more concerned with ideology and their own fixations about Brexit, or rewriting history, than the pragmatic business of running the country properly.

Yet Mr Sunak ought to regard the coming of 2023 with more optimism than he might have had when taking office in October.

Then, the fortunes of the Conservatives could hardly have been worse, and public opinion of them at a deservedly low ebb because of the dishonesty of Mr Johnson, with the scandal of lockdown law-breaking, followed by the sheer, mind-boggling incompetence of Ms Truss.

It still may be Mr Sunak’s fate to be thanked for limiting the scale of his party’s defeat at the next general election, rather than winning against the odds.

Or maybe not. His personal approval ratings remain healthy, and rightly so, because in his first few months in office Mr Sunak has returned competence to the business of Government. In partnership with the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, there is a renewed sense of people who know what they are doing being in charge.

Mr Sunak’s calm and thoughtful approach to running the country commends itself to voters who grew sick of Mr Johnson’s grandstanding and empty promises, and his obvious decency is a considerable asset to the Conservatives, which quite a number of his MPs would do well to emulate.

For voters in red wall seats, there surely has to be an appreciation that Mr Sunak understands their concerns far better than his predecessors.

In only three months in office, Mr Sunak has made a good start in reviving his party’s fortunes. If the economy picks up over the next year or so and people start to feel under less financial pressure, he could yet pull off an electoral surprise.