History Suggests Sunak's Five-Point Plan Is Doomed

Politicians of all parties love their plans, and Rishi Sunak's latest set of promises is nothing new. Three-point plans. Five-point plans. Six-point plans. Ten-point plans.

- Sean O'grady

Perhaps the earliest ancestor of the breed dates back to president Woodrow Wilson's grand “14 Points" to achieve lasting peace and justice after the First World War.

As the French premier of the day, Georges Clemenceau, remarked of the 14-clause plan for peace: "Even the good Lord only had 10." Of course President Wilson's lofty plan didn't quite work out as planned, and that seems to be the case with most of its ancestors.

The pointed plan carries many attractions. First, the convention is that each target tends to be brief, which means there's no room for detail of specificity. That means a vast prairie of wriggle room once in office.

Second, if well-designed, they are easy to remember, for candidates and public alike. Third, they can be deployed handily on all sorts of campaign material, from deletion addresses to mugs to "pledge cards", the latter most successfully by New Labour in 1997. As a result, the pledges are endlessly repeated, which helps with "messaging" and can endow them with familiarity and a spurious authority.