Rishi Sunak’s economic statement just strengthened his claim as Boris Johnson’s successor

Despite being the richest MP in the House of Commons, the chancellor is still a more credible leader than the PM, John Rentoul observes

Sunak preparing his fiscal update on Tuesday (PA)

It is obviously premature to talk about Rishi Sunak’s prospects of succeeding Boris Johnson as prime minister. So let’s do it. It may be in only three years’ time that the Conservative Party is looking for an alternative candidate to lead them into the next election.

Who knows what will happen between now and the autumn of 2023, which is when minds will start to be focused on the election expected in the summer of 2024.

First, a brief digression on dates. The Conservatives have promised to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which sets the date of the next election for 2 May 2024. It might be assumed that, because the fixed term of the act is often described as five years, the next election would be in December 2024, but the act specifies the first Thursday in May in the fifth year after the previous election.

In fact, it would only be if the act were abolished that the option of parliament running for the full five years after the last election would be restored – assuming the previous law limiting parliaments to five years was revived. Even so, any government that hoped to win an election would rather go to the country in the summer than inflict the mild inconvenience of a short-daylight winter election on the electorate.

So the summer of 2024 is the target date, and six months before that is probably the critical period for Johnson’s survival. Remember that Margaret Thatcher fell in the November of the year before the expected general election of 1991 – it was only because John Major wanted more time to establish himself and to replace the poll tax that he went on until 1992.

It would be foolish to try to predict what will happen over the next three years, but one thing we do know is that a lot of people are heading for a tough time for jobs, incomes and prospects. It would therefore seem doubly foolish to predict that the chancellor, who will oversee a period of renewed hardship, could emerge as the person to whom the nation will turn.

Indeed, there is something in the conventional wisdom of today, which is that Sunak has done the popular part of responding to the coronavirus crisis, by spending vast sums of borrowed money on the furlough scheme to protect jobs, and will now have the tougher task of trying to restore some order to the public finances while at no point allowing anyone to call it “austerity”.

Yet, Sunak is so fresh-faced and baggage-free; so calm, reasonable, fair-minded and inclusive that, if anyone can emerge with credit from three years of adversity, it might be he. Once again, he found the right words yesterday: “Although hardship lies ahead, no one will be left without hope.” It was a reassuring family doctor’s version of Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech: admitting that life will be difficult, but presenting a plan to get through it, with, as he put it, “the least well-off in society supported the most”.

For some reason, despite being the richest MP in the House of Commons and having married into the Bangalore billionaire class, Sunak is a more credible warrior for social justice than Johnson. If the prime minister continues to take a sustained media bashing over his handling of coronavirus, the chancellor is currently easily the best placed in the Tory party to replace him. At the moment, they are bound together, with Johnson chuntering “absolutely right” behind Sunak as he delivered his mini-budget. But it is easy to imagine that changing.

Perhaps not as quickly as I predicted at the time of national high dudgeon over Dominic Cummings’s flit to Durham, but it will be hard for Johnson to get through the next three years with his credentials as an election-winning miracle worker intact.

The prime minister is still more popular than you would have thought possible from reading the newspapers – 49 per cent of people in a Deltapoll survey last week said he had handled the crisis “well”. But he is more exposed than Sunak, and if they both lose ground in the popularity stakes that would still leave the chancellor – whose poll ratings are absurdly high at the moment – sitting pretty.

Then, as the next election approaches, the Conservative Party will need to think even harder than it is at the moment about Keir Starmer. Tory MPs are still slightly winded by the shock of finding themselves up against an opponent who poses a threat to their seats. If Johnson becomes unpopular – and prime ministers tend to, by the attrition of events – Sunak offers them an escape route to safety.

Here is a conventional Tory politician who responded to an economic crisis with a bold policy worthy of Gordon Brown; who emphasises the protection of the least well-off in society; and who has worked with the Trades Union Congress and retained its support even as he started to unwind the furlough scheme.

Foolish to predict, of course. But I predict that the next election could be fought – in the vibrant centre of British politics – between Sunak and Starmer.