This Christmas, Rishi Sunak will be reading Tackle!, Jilly Cooper’s new bonkbuster. Cooper sent the Prime Minister a signed copy after she discovered – through The Spectator – that he is a fan. Tackle! is about an equestrian-turned-football manager who inspires a ragtag team to unexpected victory. ‘If you want to score, you’ve got to be a player,’ declares the cover. ‘It is literally on my bedside table,’ says Sunak when we meet in his office in 10 Downing Street.

‘This is the first year in a long time that I have actually read some fiction,’ he says. ‘I read these lovely books, which is good escapism for me.’ One is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (about gaming geeks) and the other is Lessons in Chemistry (about a female chemist fighting misogyny in the 1950s).

‘I can sit here and say: “Do you know what? Of all the things I said I would do, I’ve made progress”’

Perhaps it is not surprising that he is turning to escapism. The Tories end this year in a miserable position. The party has failed to dent Labour’s 20-point lead, Sunak’s personal ratings have slumped, and his backbenchers are in a rebellious mood.

A little over a year since he became Prime Minister, and with an opinion poll deficit that no party leader has ever recovered from, is Sunak enjoying the job? ‘Yes!’ he replies enthusiastically, without pausing for breath. ‘Of course, it’s hard. I knew it was going to be. I did it because I care about service, I care about this country and I thought I could make a difference. I believe that every single day. I come down here every day and I am really lucky; I get to work with an incredible group of people. I feel that I’m making progress so I can sit here and say: “Do you know what? Of all the things I said I would do, I’ve made progress.” And that is fulfilling.’

What progress? ‘I have always said I’m a Thatcherite in the truest sense. As Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher said: cut inflation, cut taxes. That’s what we’ve done! We have delivered more tax cuts in one fiscal event than at any point since the 1980s.’ This will be his narrative for next year’s election: he took difficult decisions, they worked, and so he has been able to cut taxes.

Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty in Hiroshima, Japan (Getty Images)

The slight problem with his argument is that taxes are not just rising but are higher than any post-war government has dared push them. Some of this is due to corporation tax rises, but the biggest tax hike was to freeze the thresholds, which will trap four million more low-paid workers in income tax, with three million more being taxed at the 40p rate. Can he really fight an election talking about his National Insurance cut without admitting that it doesn’t do nearly enough to offset these rises?

‘That’s a really glass-half-empty way to look at it,’ he responds. ‘You’ve got to differentiate. Look, why is the tax burden as high as it is? It’s because we had a once-in-a-century pandemic and we had a war in Ukraine, both of which necessitated an enormous response from the government.

‘I think it’s completely fine to have said the government should not have responded to help everyone with energy bills, the government should not have responded during Covid… If one person had consistently said that throughout, totally fine.

‘[But] nobody did, not a single person said that you shouldn’t have done all those things. I was very clear at the time, we should do those things but let’s be clear that that will have consequences and we will have to pay that money back and yes, like a Thatcherite and actually just a good Conservative, if you borrow money it does have to be paid back.

‘The choice at the next election is between me and Keir Starmer. A Labour party that wants to borrow £28 billion a year is not going to control welfare or public spending. A Conservative party is going to do those things – and cut your taxes instead.’

‘I am fighting for the things I believe in. There’s nothing tetchy. But I am passionate’

The welfare point is one he’s keen on. As chancellor, he was struck that a third of all UK households were in receipt of some kind of benefit. It was a sign, he thought, of the extraordinary expansion of the welfare state. The situation became even worse after the Covid lockdowns, when Britain was the only major country in Europe not to recover its pre-pandemic workforce. What does he think went wrong? How could 18 per cent of Manchester and 20 per cent of Liverpool and Glasgow be on out-of-work benefits in the middle of a worker-shortage crisis?

‘Because the welfare system is not working as it should,’ he says. ‘Over the last decade we haven’t reformed those rules [to qualify for welfare]. Three times as many people today are being told that they don’t have to work because of ill-health than were a decade ago. I don’t believe our country has got three times sicker.’

Plans to tighten the welfare criteria are, however, not due to be implemented until April 2025. If the problem is urgent, why are the fixes so slow in coming?

‘Again, I think that’s a glass-half-empty way to look at it, because no one was doing any reform in this area until I started it as chancellor,’ he says. Some changes ‘take time because they are very large system changes – you are dealing with a very complex system… Our priority, going forward, is to control spending and welfare so that we can cut taxes. We are in a position to be able to do all that because we have got inflation down. The economy has turned a corner and that means that there can be a gear shift in how we approach taxes.’

The trebling of net migration after Brexit has led to another gear shift in government policy. From April next year, visas will be granted only to those in the highest-paid third of earners (£38,700). Foreigners who come to the UK initially to study and hope subsequently to make their way up the salary scale will face deportation. Sunak says the government ‘will work through the transition of the people who are already here’ in a ‘fair and sensible way’, but he won’t apologise for the policy.

‘In all these areas there will be hard cases, but if you want to bring the levels of legal migration down, you have to be prepared to make some difficult decisions.’ Nevertheless, his former ally Robert Jenrick quit as Sunak’s immigration minister this month accusing him of making the wrong decision when it came to how to stop the boats. He said he believed that the government’s new illegal immigration bill did not provide the ‘best possible chance for success’. Sunak doesn’t want to go into the timeline of events that saw his former friend leave office: ‘You won’t expect me to get into all of that,’ he says, before adding: ‘We’re always sad to lose people from government.’

Rishi Sunak during a press conference at Downing Street, 7 March 2023 (Getty Images)

Yet he still talks as though his plan to ‘stop the boats’ is working. ‘If someone had said to me, “You are going to have reduced the number of small boat arrivals into this country by a third”, after they had quadrupled in the last few years… I think someone would have said, “What are you smoking?”’ (Though of course no one will be smoking anything at all if Sunak’s generational ban goes ahead.) He may regard 30,000 small-boat crossings, down from last year’s 45,000, as a success, but his pledge in January was to end illegal arrivals entirely. In retrospect, were the words ‘stop the boats’ a mistake?

‘No, I think it’s a straightforward phrase,’ he says. ‘Everyone knows what I wanted to do. I do ultimately want to stop the boats, because there isn’t an acceptable amount of illegal migration.’ If Sunak can get his Rwanda Bill through the Commons and Lords, how soon will flights take off? He won’t be drawn. ‘I’m keen to crack on with it,’ he says. Sunak has consistently refused to rule out withdrawing from the ECHR if his bill fails. But he does say that Rwanda won’t accept deportees who have no legal recourse to Strasbourg. The arguments over the Rwanda scheme are causing deep divisions within his party, and he is trying to pre-empt rebellion. ‘What the country wants is a practical government that is making a difference to their lives and changing things for the better, not a debating society,’ he says. ‘People are frustrated that the pace of change is not fast enough. I get that. I am working night and day, tirelessly, to keep making a difference.’ The demands of the job, he says, means he has cut his daily workouts ‘down to once a week’.

Sunak is keen on spin classes. When he took his summer holiday to the US, he used it as an opportunity to take many exercise classes, including a Taylor Swift-themed SoulCycle ride. (He is a self-confessed ‘Swiftie’, and says he had a ‘very enjoyable time’ at her Eras concert during the trip.) One fellow rider posted a video on TikTok saying she had seen the PM’s security at the class and mistakenly thought the pop star herself was about to attend. ‘I would be quite dis-appointed as well,’ Sunak laughs.

The PM’s critics say that while he may be hard-working, he is uninspiring. He has been accused of being ‘tetchy’ – most recently during his diplomatic spat with the Greek Prime Minister over the Elgin Marbles. What does he think of the allegation? ‘I don’t understand that,’ he replies. He points to his leadership campaign. ‘That wasn’t an easy time for me, I was taking a lot of criticism and flak. But I just fought hard for what I believed in – every day, seven days a week for six weeks. I’m the same person now, I am fighting for the things I believe in. There’s nothing tetchy. But I am passionate. When things are not working the way I want them to work, of course I’m going to be frustrated.’

A new surprise ally in government is David Cameron, now Lord Cameron. Even before he was made Foreign Secretary, Sunak consulted him over Gaza. ‘It was clear to me that the international picture is complicated and challenging. And it’s not looking like it’s going to get any easier any time soon,’ he says. ‘At the same time, there was someone in public life who had almost unrivalled experience and relationships. He wanted to come and help me win an election.’ This is the first hint that Sunak sees Cameron as an asset on the election trail.

The assumption behind that thinking is that it will be Sunak who will lead his party into that election. David Frost, a former cabinet member, has suggested the Tories could need yet another change of leader before the campaign starts. What is Sunak’s message to any Tory MPs spending the Christmas break thinking of mutiny?

‘We are going into an election year. We have got to make this about the choice between me and Keir Starmer, about the Con-servatives and the Labour party. There is a very clear choice that we can present to the country when we are united.’