A farewell to Rishi
Farewell, Rasheed Sanook. As you fly into the sunset, ensconced comfortably in your first-class seats as you hurtle towards California, you will already be fading from people’s memory.
Another strange creature created from modern politics’ peculiar mould, the mantel of statesman always sat awkwardly upon your shoulders. Parachuted into the safest of safe seats, you never showed an ounce of relatability, an iota of comprehending the average person’s concerns, or a dram of political nous.
Each action screamed awkwardness.
Whose favourite dish is ‘sandwiches’? That is the answer of a man who is too scared to commit to anything concrete, or perhaps the honest response of a six-year-old child. An election announced in the pouring rain without the good sense of having a brolly. A speech given by the dock where the Titanic was built. Abandoning D-Day remembrances to give an interview on ITV. Being content to be second billing to ‘the UK’s most tattooed mum’ the morning of the election.
One wonders what the campaign staff were up to the whole time. I imagine like one of those terrible teams in The Apprentice, where one bad idea is adopted keenly and augmented with many other idiotic amendments, the end result being a car crash of incompetence.
Few would contest that Sunak is a bad person. I certainly don’t: he seems like a very decent man. Moreover, he is highly competent: a first from Oxford, an MBA from Stanford, a career at Goldman Sachs and whichever other financial institutions, followed by a rapid rise through the ranks of Britain’s political establishment.
He was highly suited to be a manager somewhere or continue as a banker, mulling over spreadsheets. Yet, in a role requiring conviction and belief, he was a poor choice.
He, too, played his part in the dethroning of the hen-pecked warmonger, Boris Johnson, for which some gratitude should be expressed. Ostensibly, Sunak was a voice against lockdown, for which again we should be show only limited thanks, as it was under his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer that the later seeds of our inflationary spiral were sewn.
The momentary premiership of Liz Truss – accompanied as it was by levels of hysteria once rarely, but now regularly, seen on these isles – was followed by Sunak’s crowning by default: everyone else had, by that stage, pulled out of the contest. An unelected technocrat had been placed into Nunber 10 as Britain entered increasingly murky waters – political upheavals around the world, wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, immigration at historically unprecedented levels – all of which required bold vision and swift action, we instead had a ‘safe pair of hands’ at the tiller, which refused to change course lest he create too much of a wave.
The signs of faulty judgement were swift. Appointing David Cameron as the foreign secretary was the most glaring. Resurrecting a failed former PM may have inspired confidence in the dull comment pages of The Telegraph but it set alarm bells ringing across middle England. Our new leader, clearly, had no conception of what lay close to the hearts of our country’s increasingly glum and resentful electorate.
A politician of the Blair-Cameron mould, Sunak imagined that showing competence – through the repetition of manipulated, hand-picked stats and facts, together with a studied disdain for ideological pronouncements and for the seeing-through of policies that his voter base wanted – would be enough.
After all, it had been for predecessors. He failed to fully realise, however, that tectonic shifts were taking place beneath his feet.
Throughout the election campaign, Sunak oversaw a strategy which combined both soporific dullness with intelligence-insulting dishonesty. Attack ads claiming that Labour would open our borders were almost belly-laugh-inducing in their audacity. The sense that they were a party void of both conviction and ideas became inescapable. An 80-seat majority that could have been defended so easily turned into one of history’s great routs.
Somehow Rishi was caught off-guard by the threat to his right, with Reform UK being the election’s ultimate winners, if not in terms of seats. Given the British public’s rumbling disquiet for decades, such a lack of perceptiveness can only be the result of a total disconnect from the people of this nation.
Now, the baton has been passed from blue to red. We wait patiently for signs of Labour’s much vaunted radicality. In the meantime, the Conservatives will lick their wounds and come to a conclusion of where they must now head.
After decades of believing they could ignore the concerns of the right at no cost whatsoever, that arrogant assumption has been blown out the water. Yet, a pig-headed institution to its core, there is no certainty that any lessons will have been learned. Reform must kick this staggering corpse of a party while its down.
The future will be grasped by men and women of conviction. The value-free era has passed and we have turned the corner, once more, into ideologically charged waters. Those such as Rishi Sunak, who made inevitable this outcome, will likely be remembered as a blob, not as individuals, for they have scarcely little to tell them apart.
They will be like the emperors of the Third Century Crisis, where Rome had 25 claimants to the title of emperor. So rapid in succession and so unable to leave their mark, they will be known only to those dedicated to studying this particular era of unrest.
Sunak will likely be the second-last PM of the post-1997 managerial elite. What comes afterwards, however, is what matters now.
Men and women lacking in ideological conviction will have little place in this new, rapidly emerging world.
This article will also feature in our July 2024 print issue.
