Since November last year, the UK’s ruling Conservative Party has been gripped by rebellion, chaos, and a collapse in popular support. Be it revelations that Boris Johnson partied in Downing Street while the nation groaned under the weight of COVID restrictions or Liz Truss’s tax cuts for the rich during a sharp rise in inflation, this ten-month period has been the most painful in the Tories’ recent history. And with the appointment of Rishi Sunak as the new prime minister by a cabal of MPs, the agonies are not about to abate.

Sunak has three tasks to perform. With the pound and UK government bonds getting tossed around by the turbulence of the global money markets, the former chancellor has to offer the squally seas something to becalm them. This will come in the form of a program for paying down state debt, and the Financial Times briefed this morning that Sunak has set a five-year target to get it falling. This means continuing with the emergency reversal of Truss’s ill-fated mini budget under the new chancellor and former health secretary, Jeremy Hunt. The markets did not move in either direction following news of Sunak’s appointment, and so this can be chalked up as a victory of sorts.

The second is to make sure everyone but the wealthy and the Tories’ core supporters pay for the crisis. This means another round of “balancing the books” by further cutting a public sector already weakened by more than a decade of austerity. That said, this is much easier said than done, as the Tories are already overseeing industrial disputes on the rail network and at Royal Mail, with strike action also due from university workers and the threat of stoppages from nurses. There is a chance that the government is taking on too many fights at once to force such a program through, and a forced retreat would prove catastrophic for the new prime minister’s fledgling authority.