Three reasons why Rishi Sunak is an "absolute dud"
His vanity, extremism, and irresponsibility
To blame Rishi Sunak for what looks like a catastrophic Conservative defeat can feel petty.
Huge shifts are reshaping the UK. The young and the middle-aged no longer feel the Conservative party offers anything to them.
Austerity destroyed the Tory reputation as a guardian of the public services. Brexit broke the party’s historic connection to business. Boris Johnson destroyed its reputation for propriety.
If you want to pick a date when a Tory defeat became inevitable, wind back the clock to 23 September 2022, when Kwasi Kwarteng crashed the pound, the markets and the private pension industry with the Truss government’s version of Reaganomics for dummies.
It was the Conservative equivalent of Pickett’s charge at the Battle of Gettysburg – the moment when all was thrown away in an act of insane recklessness.[i]
When John Caudwell, a business donor, who has given the Conservatives hundreds of thousands of pounds, announces he is supporting Labour because Sunak is an “absolute dud”, it feels harsh.
Surely, the strange figure of Sunak – a babbling, eager man, who seems not to understand his country –was just the politician left holding the Tory leadership when the music stopped.
That is to be too kind to him. And although we are always told to “be kind” we should never be too kind to our leaders.
There are three reasons to think Rishi Sunak has turned a disaster into a catastrophe:
1/ His overweening vanity
You may find this hard to believe, in fact it is almost impossible to believe, but on 22 May when he called an election Rishi Sunak and his circle of deeply loyal and border-line insane advisers thought the prime minister was a star.
So convinced were they that the public would warm to Sunak once they saw him campaigning, they decided to run a presidential campaign focusing on the great leader.
Even though there was a plausible argument from a Tory point of view to give the economy a few more months to improve, even though the Tory party machine – what’s left of it – was not ready, such was their faith in Sunak and Sunak’s faith in himself, they decided to go early
Fraser Nelson, the editor of the conservative Spectator (full disclosure: I write for him) had an inside account of the Cabinet meeting when Sunak told his colleagues that the King had granted his request for an election. (Notice that Sunak was presenting the Cabinet with a fait accompli. He wasn’t asking whether he should see the King. He was telling them that he had seen the King.)
There was “stunned disbelief”. Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, told him that this was the wrong time for an election. David Cameron said it was a “bold” decision which, as every Yes Minister fan knows, is Westminster-speak for a “mad” decision.
Because Sunak believes in himself with the fervour of a true egomaniac, he said it would be a presidential campaign. The public would be invited to vote for Rishi Sunak, not the Conservative party.
According to his admirers on the right, Isaac Levido, Sunak’s campaign director brings with him an” incredible amount of focus, discipline and rigour”.
Seriously?
His disciplined and rigorous mind somehow missed that at the very moment he was calling the election Sunak was fantastically unpopular. A YouGov survey showed only 20% of people had a positive view of him while 71% had a negative one.
The Conservative hope was that the polls would narrow, as they often do in election campaigns, and Sunak could start asking the voters: do you really want the chaos of a hung Parliament?
Why not give me another go as prime minister instead?
Now, instead of being where they expected to be and warning people that they must vote Conservative to avoid the danger of a hung Parliament, Sunak is saying they must vote Conservative because Labour is heading to a supermajority!
When Rishi Sunak is gone, I suspect he will leave a void. People will struggle to remember who was prime minister between 2022 and 2024. Perhaps he will be remembered for messing up the D-Day commemorations, but that will be that.
He ought to be remembered as a roaring egomaniac. Only a widely disliked politician, unburdened by imposter syndrome, could make an election campaign all about him.
His egomania and extreme wealth must be linked.
The Sunak family fortune is estimated at £651m in the latest Sunday Times rich list, up from £529m in 2023.
Extreme wealth breeds the type of overconfidence and overweening vanity that thinks the very sight of you on the campaign trail will make a suspicious and disillusioned public think “hey, we got it wrong, he’s a really great guy”.
2/ Sunak has let the radical right off the hook
We ought to be living through a reckoning with what the radical right has done to this country. The Brexit Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson brought has isolated and weakened the UK.
Farage is now attacking the Tories. His stated aim is to destroy them. And yet from Sunak there is no reckoning. The Labour centre-left fought with great and frankly merciless viciousness to defeat the far left.
Sunak emboldens the radical right but refuses to fight it.
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