The most basic piece of advice in every management book (I’ve read them so you don’t have to!) is that people respect clear decision-making. That is after all the point of a leader, to decide, and in the cocktail of heuristics and biases that guides our hand at the ballot box, decisiveness is often a stronger ingredient than honesty.
Rishi Sunak was already seen as indecisive by most (57 per cent) of the British public the last time YouGov polled on the subject in mid-November. Not great, but not actually that far behind Keir Starmer (of whom 50 per cent of voters considered to be indecisive in the same poll). Why, then, did Sunak tell the public, much of which thought there would be an election in May (and much of which want one then or before, according to another recent poll) that the general election won’t happen until “the second half of this year”? This only makes him appear even less decisive, especially given the rather faint pencilling-in that this is a “working assumption”.
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