Farewell Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak, who seems doomed to electoral oblivion Thursday, is the U.K. Conservative Party’s fifth prime minister in eight years. He will never be judged on his own terms now, and this is his curse.

Sunak ascended to the premiership in 2022, the year both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss fell, and he has not escaped their shadow. He was Johnson’s chancellor and assassin; then the man called to lead when Truss shattered seven weeks into her tenure. His party had only just rejected him in a leadership contest, choosing her instead.

Sunak was the good Tory who would unite the right after the Truss calamity, and handsome too. He was, at 42, the youngest prime minister in two centuries. In two days we will know the precise shape of his failure.

It’s hard to read a man about whom there is no gossip. He was born in Southampton, a provincial town on the south coast of England, to Indian immigrants, a doctor and a pharmacist.

As a child he wanted to be a Jedi knight: to live in a parallel universe. Instead, he went to Winchester College, a gilded public school, and Oxford University, where he was president of the Investment Society and a ballroom dancer.

There is a video of him from those years, shot for a documentary about class. “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are, you know, working-class,” he says, all trace of Southampton stripped from his voice. Then he adds, as if fearing ridicule: “Well, not working-class!” At each school he attended he was head boy. He’s still head boy, though the public school accent has flattened.

Sunak worked for Goldman Sachs and at a couple of hedge funds before taking an MBA at Stanford, where he met Akshata Murty, daughter of an Indian tech billionaire, now his wife. With few contacts, his route to politics was his childhood friend James Forsyth, then the political editor of the Spectator, the Tory in-house magazine.

The wrong color boots

He became MP for Richmond in rural Yorkshire, a seat previously held by the former Conservative leader William Hague. When Sunak campaigned, if people said they loved Hague, he would reply: “I’m the next William Hague; I’ve just got a better tan!”

They stared when he bought blue rain boots to tour the local farms — in Yorkshire they wear green. He didn’t repeat the error. I wonder if, for Sunak — who is stylish for a Tory — politics was a lifestyle choice. The reality must have been appalling.

His politics are boiler-plate Thatcherite economics, the vague promise of AI, and pro-Brexit patriotism, which is meaningless if you have no wider vision. Beyond that, he has no answers to Britain’s woes. If he inherited a ruin — which will be his post-election narrative — he has done nothing to rebuild it. The shine of Sunak was only ever his not being someone else: Johnson or Truss.

He has the appearance of propriety — beautiful suits! — but negligible political gifts. He didn’t denounce Johnson and Truss, and he returned David Cameron to the front bench as foreign secretary, stymying the only strategy that might have worked in this election: change. (It handed John Major victory in 1992 after the increasingly unpopular Thatcher was knifed).

By refusing to fight the radical right, Sunak emboldened it. He doesn’t understand how public services work, he can’t delegate responsibility, he appears out of touch because he is. His wife claimed non-domicile tax status which allowed her to avoid paying U.K. taxes, even as he raised taxes for others. He announced the end of the HS2 high speed-rail project, the flagship policy to renew Northern England, while in the northern English city of Manchester. His policy to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda is both cruel and ineffective, and that is a fair measure of a leadership which has alienated everyone.

By refusing to fight the radical right, Sunak emboldened it. He doesn’t understand how public services work, he can’t delegate responsibility, he appears out of touch because he is.| Andy Buchanan/Getty Images

The election campaign was a disaster. The secrecy of the timing, and the pain it brought to MPs, staff and membership, who weren’t ready, suggests he does not want to hold high office again. There are better places to be loved. When he stood outside Downing Street in the rain, drowned out by the Labour anthem “Things Can Only Get Better,” I thought: he’s had enough. Does he even want to win? Either that or his arrogance surpasses even his predecessors, and that, at least, is Tory progress.

Leaving the D-Day commemorations in Normandy early to do a TV interview was, subconsciously, an act of self-harm. He might have neutralized Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, peeling voters off his right, by delaying the election. Farage wanted to hold Donald Trump’s hand in November, not stand as an MP in Clacton-on-Sea.

Sunak’s courtesy doesn’t work in large groups: it feels tinny and insincere, a man on holiday to a reality he can’t grasp.  He angers quickly when he is not praised. He has always been praised, and it shows.  

Tetchy Rishi

Soon into his tenure he was  nicknamed “Tetchy Rishi.” He chomped down slogans at the election debates and talked over Labour Leader Keir Starmer — all public schoolboys learn to do this — while screaming lines about tax he must have known weren’t true. I think Forsyth told him being PM would be fun. That wasn’t true either.

Then, as the polling numbers collapsed, he let go, as sane men do. He cared less, and he did better, and I think he may stem the Reform tide a little. He’s more likeable when he stops trying to please people, stops trying to relate — because he can’t — and is infuriated by people’s failure to respond to his deceptions.

He’s the richest man in the House of Commons, richer than King Charles, and though he doesn’t tend easily to metaphor — he’s too functional, too closed — that’s a fitting epigraph for the tomb of 14 years of this kind of Toryism. There’s a narcissism to Sunak’s governance: a sense that when he stares at the voter, he sees himself, without recognition, or malice.

He’s the richest man in the House of Commons, richer than King Charles, | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

British people don’t want to learn math to 18 or play chess in parks, or do national service, like Sunak told them they should. Not everyone is head boy material. He is bewitched by AI: does he even like people? It’s still the Spartans at Thermopylae, but he cowers less now, because the end is near.

Sunak was supposed to be the Tory angel, immaculate among thieves. He was meant to eat the sins of Cameron, who called the Brexit referendum from hubris; of Johnson the liar; of Truss the maniac. Rather, he compounded them with a lack of political vision, effectiveness, and guts. His ambitions were small, because men like Sunak don’t need politics — and when they think they do, it’s vanity.

What is his authentic self, if there is such a thing? When he said he loved the novels of Jilly Cooper, which are about English aristocrats riding horses and having sex in the Cotswolds — and he has read them, he name-checked them — I thought: he dreams about playing polo and being secure in the world, but the British class system is cruel, and gives that to almost no one.

For the rest, I doubt we will ever know. My best guess is he is a driven, uneasy, rich man with no imagination beyond the narrow aspiration formed in him at Winchester, which he would do better to despise. He was, for the first time in his life, not good enough for the task, and I wonder how much that will grieve him, and if he will ever understand.