If the Tories needed proof that Rishi Sunak is a loser, they found it in a game of marbles | Isabel Hardman

‘Why is he just so bad at politics?” fumed one Tory MP after Rishi Sunak’s abrupt cancellation of the Greek prime minister over the Parthenon marbles last week. “This says everything about where his antennae point: away from what ordinary MPs think about, let alone ordinary voters.” Even supporters of the prime minister view the row as unfortunate, not least because they suspect that many “ordinary MPs” had, until last week, thought the sculptures were just very precious toy marbles.

Sunak’s decision to nix a meeting with Kyriakos Mitsotakis wasn’t a calculated way of showing that he was standing up to European countries: it was a personal reaction to “grandstanding” about an issue that he fears could have implications for other artefacts. But the way the row unfolded does say a lot about the PM – and about his party.

Sunak’s critics would much rather that the week had been dominated by talk of how the government is trying to resolve its problem with the Rwanda deportation policy. On Friday, Sunak admitted that Britons’ patience was “wearing thin”, and said he wanted to start flights of asylum seekers as soon as possible. But many MPs on the right of the party suspect that his heart isn’t really in the methods that they insist are essential to this, including giving ministers the ability to disapply elements of the European convention on human rights. Disregarding the convention is, for a good number of Tory MPs, a confidence issue, to the extent that the chatter in the party about the number of letters calling for a vote of no confidence in the prime minister has risen from the constant mizzle that is normal weather in the Tory party to a louder downpour.

The emergency legislation is taking a while to work out, not least because, regardless of its content, it will result in at least one ministerial resignation. The briefing around the bill has turned into a milkman’s order book, with the immigration minister Robert Jenrick being as unsubtle as he possibly can that he can only stomach “full-fat” measures, while his new boss at the Home Office, James Cleverly, is minded towards skimming off the bits that would risk the legislation getting stuck and curdled in the House of Lords.

Jenrick and Sunak have held meetings to thrash out a compromise, but colleagues who feel that the former is working on their behalf still expect him to quit if their demands aren’t met. They assume that if a “full-fat” bill emerges, Victoria Prentis will quit as attorney general. “Their positions are mutually exclusive,” observes a colleague. That then raises the question of whether Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, who has been as outspoken about the rule of law as the bounds of collective responsibility allow, might have to consider his position too. Sunak doesn’t like confrontation, but he has to follow through on his promise to get flights going by the next election, and that means breaking some eggs.

Many ministers are sympathetic to Sunak’s predicament; the phrase “doing the best he can at an impossible job” crops up a lot. But the wider party isn’t quite so supportive, which is why so many things the prime minister tries to do get such a flat response.

He lost his marbles battle because his party isn’t in the mood to cheer any old nonsense. There were precious few MPs prepared to go on the airwaves and explain why cancelling the meeting was in fact a genius move – which is something even self-respecting politicians are often prepared to do when they’re fully supportive of a leader. They don’t trust that he will stick by a position, either, whether it be on marbles or migration. “Why would you trust him when he went from his press conference saying [Rwanda] was the key measure to this week where it’s just one of a ‘basket of measures’,” complains one senior backbencher. A more charitable view might be that by talking about the basket, Sunak and Cleverly have merely been trying to show voters that they aren’t just working on Rwanda but on other measures designed to stop the boats – and ones that are a little more successful. The problem, though, is that there aren’t enough Tory MPs with a charitable view right now.

The impression that Sunak doesn’t know what he’s doing from week to week hasn’t exactly been helped by his relaunch as the “change candidate” at this autumn’s party conference. That new branding lasted about a month before a de-launch, back to warning voters that they shouldn’t risk it with Labour.

Polling at the end of the summer had suggested to Sunak’s team that the next general election would be a “change election”. When their conference positioning didn’t work, they probed the polling further, and realised that, rather than painting Keir Starmer as the continuity that voters should reject, it was Conservative continuity and painting the Labour party as extreme and incoherent that was going to claw back support for the Tories.

Sunak is visibly more comfortable with the current positioning, which includes bringing in one of the key figures from the consensus of the past 30 years that he recently claimed to reject: David Cameron. Cameron will remind Sunak that he faced endless whingeing from Conservative backbenchers before he won a majority in 2015. Sunak should probably remember that Cameron’s attempts to deal with that whingeing led to his demise in the form of an EU referendum he hadn’t wanted and that he unexpectedly lost.

Even if Sunak is feeling more comfortable, continuity hasn’t made any difference in the polls. But Sunak’s allies say that they weren’t expecting a big response from voters, who they think are deliberately not paying attention to an even more tedious season of Westminster politics than the previous few years. Isaac Levido, the party’s political strategist, told friends at the start of the year that he didn’t expect the polls to move at all in 2023. Some of his colleagues don’t think the Conservatives are going to regain a lead over Labour, but others argue that it’s got to happen at some point: “We just need the party to act like it’s a team rather than all this fighting.”

Leaders whose troops think they’re in with a good chance of winning the next election enjoy much more leeway than Sunak gets: right now, too many Tory MPs have checked out mentally and can’t be bothered to go through the motions of backing up Sunak. Even when the prime minister alights on a slogan, he has little hope of his MPs chanting it robotically in the way they did before previous Conservative election victories. In 2015, it was “long-term economic plan”, and in 2019 “Get Brexit Done”. The “long-term economic plan” had the benefit of being sufficiently meaningless that you couldn’t scrutinise it, while “Get Brexit Done” was direct but also vague: there was no need for detail of how. “Long-term decisions for a brighter future” is too long, and requires MPs to believe that decisions are being taken, when they manifestly aren’t on a number of key issues, such as housing and social care.

Scrapping a rail line that was already hotly contested and its budget visibly bloated wasn’t as difficult a long-term decision as those supply-side issues that are preventing voters from owning their own homes – or even renting ones with enough space to start a family – or the NHS from being able to control when patients leave its hospitals. Neither will a crackdown on smoking make much long-term difference when teenagers walk into their classrooms under a cloud of nicotine from vapes. But even if the slogan and the policies added up, Tory MPs aren’t really in the mood to chant: there isn’t enough team spirit for that.

For all the frustration expressed against Sunak, there is almost as much strength of feeling from ministers about their colleagues who are busy fighting their own party. Many don’t understand why it hasn’t yet pulled together; they see all the briefings and counter-briefings over Rwanda as entirely counterproductive and the sort of self-destructive behaviour that you’d expect from a group already licking its wounds in opposition after an election defeat. Which is why the question about why Sunak is so bad at politics isn’t fair. His “ordinary MPs” are also behaving as though they don’t have the toughest election of their history ahead of them. Marbles don’t win elections, but then neither do divided parties.