TOfter such a resounding – not to say downright rude – rejection by the electorate, it takes more than a little imagination to recall the day Rishi Sunak became prime minister. On 25 October 2022, Sunak stood outside Number 10 and made his first speech in charge of the country. In it, he also made his first mistakes.
He promised – recklessly, in retrospect – that the government he was to lead “will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at all levels.” Given the evidently disobedient habits of his rank-and-file MPs, he probably should have mentioned this at the draft stage. In fact, he became a terrible hostage to fortune, right up to and during the 2024 election campaign, when the insider-betting scandal broke.
Sunak also committed another crime unimaginable for a cautious politician, one that, tragically, he repeated again and again during his premiership. He promised too much. He said he would deliver on the 2019 manifesto, something that by then was surely impossible, given the state of the public finances, as he knew better than most.
She even went so far as to detail, in bullet point form, the first of many to-do lists, each one a punishment for herself: “A stronger NHS. Better schools. Safer streets. Controlling our borders. Protecting our environment. Supporting our armed forces. Levelling up and building an economy that seizes the opportunities of Brexit, where businesses invest, innovate and create jobs.”
In the months that followed, he continued with his famous list of five “people’s priorities”, most of which were not met. The one that was met – reducing inflation – was largely the work of the Bank of England. He failed to “stop the ships” or reduce NHS waiting lists. Last autumn, he cancelled the northern extension of the HS2 project, a flagship of northern regeneration and a rare substantial and tangible contribution to the “levelling up” agenda that the Conservatives had pursued since David Cameron and George Osborne came up with the idea. The fact that some of the HS2 money – none of it was actually “saved” – was instead spent on filling potholes in Leighton Buzzard, among other quintessentially southern towns, was also a sad symbol.
Sunak didn’t lie as much as Boris Johnson, although some of his recent election propaganda has earned him reprimands from the civil service; however, he broke his promises as easily as any of his predecessors. It’s not something anyone should reasonably condemn a politician for – it’s how they behave, after all, and even the saintly Keir Starmer is known for adapting his policy positions to changing circumstances.
What went wrong with Sunak is that he made so many of his promises and priorities clear, and so firmly, that he left himself no room for manoeuvre. In some ways, this was refreshing and should have improved his image, but it didn’t, and now he is left making excuses, blaming others and looking like a failure. Worse still, the more the opposition, the media and the public reminded him of his shortcomings during televised election debates, the more petulant and irritable he became. He does not seem to adapt well to challenges.
The most chilling example of this has been the great immigration fiasco. The Rwanda plan – let’s be frank – was devised by Johnson and his then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, to show that they were doing “something” (i.e. anything) about the migration crisis. It was based on a misreading of a plan once carried out by the Australians, which involved their navy towing migrant boats into international waters and, ultimately, into camps in a third country, which became so squalid that the entire policy was abandoned.
The English Channel is not an international waterway; the Royal Navy wanted nothing to do with it, and since Britain is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, carrying it out was always going to be problematic. Johnson didn’t care about the details, but Sunak did.
As chancellor, he made no secret of his opposition to the costly scheme. Privately, during his bid for the presidency, he wanted to scrap it (one insider told the media he had “no serious interest” in illegal or legal immigration “until he was convinced otherwise during the campaign”). He then turned it into a personal crusade, ending with relocating a volunteer to Kigali at a cost of about £300m. It would have been cheaper to let the potential migrant win the lottery every week for a year. Politically, Sunak’s attachment to a scheme described by his own home secretary as “nonsense” is inexplicable.
Sunak, defined by the Rwanda plan and unlike his more anarchic predecessors, had a hard time defining himself. The first years of his premiership were ones of technocratic pragmatism: renegotiating the complicated Northern Ireland protocol included in Johnson’s Brexit deal, repairing relations with the EU, France and the US, getting public finances under control and governing with spreadsheets.
Then, bit by bit, Sunak became a more militant cultural warrior, resorting to provocative but meaningless rhetoric like “a man is a man, a woman is a woman, and that’s just common sense.” He said as much at the 2023 party conference in Manchester, in the same speech, delivered in a hotel that had once been a train station, as he announced that the rest of HS2 was to be dismantled.
It was then that he embarked on an extraordinary odyssey to become “the candidate for change,” after nearly a decade and a half of his party being in power. In a vain attempt to add credibility to this improbable mission, Sunak disavowed the previous 30 years of British government, including all the governments of Major, Cameron, May, Johnson and, most forgivably, Truss. It was disconcerting to the activists there, and to the country. The new Conservative slogan, “Make no mistake, it’s time for change, and we are it,” was discreetly canned.
When the time comes for Sunak to write his memoirs, he will find plenty of excuses at his disposal. The legacy he inherited was terrible. Winning a fifth consecutive term would be unprecedented and, with better luck, a struggle. He faced a revived and repositioned Labour Party. Brexit was over and had been deemed a failure (and Sunak had always been a devoted Eurosceptic). Even if he had wanted to, he could not undo most of the deal. The Covid pandemic and energy crisis piled debt upon debt, and the Tories’ tax rises (always denied) were real and inevitable.
But as well as over-promising and under-delivering, Sunak made plenty of mistakes. He made reckless appointments, whether out of weakness or not. Suella Braverman was a loud and disloyal disaster at the Home Office, while his party’s chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, had some highly publicised difficulties with his tax affairs. During the election campaign, two of Sunak’s own advisers were embroiled in a betting scandal. He did not foresee how his vast wealth – and his wife’s non-resident status – would be resented in a country in the throes of a cost-of-living crisis.
Over time, Sunak became more accident-prone, as with his “drowned rat” election announcement. Perhaps it was bad luck, as was Nigel Farage’s decision to go back to his old ways. But some of the ideas in his manifesto were so half-baked that they seemed to scream desperation: neither compulsory maths until age 18 nor the return of military service enthused the electorate.
Sunak also made mistakes that were not forced. It was he who decided to hold the election when he did and to run a long campaign. It was he who decided to abandon the D-Day commemorations early. No one made him say he had a disadvantaged childhood because he was not allowed to watch Sky TV. It was he who made such a big deal of tax cuts when the public simply wanted basic public services restored, trains that ran on time and clean rivers.
Sunak was an unfortunate prime minister; he is a talented man, but he is also someone who, time and again, failed to grasp the public mood. He has spent his life breaking barriers, chasing and winning glittering prizes – son of immigrants, Winchester delegate, Oxford prime minister, Fulbright scholar at Stanford, Goldman Sachs, MP at 34, prime minister at 42, the youngest in recent history – only to be derided as a “miniature loser” by Angela Rayner and a “moron” by one of Farage’s thugs.
Losing the election will be a bitter blow for him, especially when he thinks of his more avoidable mistakes. The prime ministership came too soon. In a parallel universe, it would have been far better for him to become party leader now, regroup as opposition leader (a tough apprenticeship for a man who has only ever been on the ruling side) and win the next election.
Still, he’s only 44 and has plenty of money to burn, with plenty more prizes still to come.
