The Talented, Doomed Mr. Sunak

FIRST PUBLISHED: MY SUBSTACK (JULY 4TH 2024)

Prime Minister Sunak will not hold his title for long. Bar some catastrophic error in polling, he will lose todays general election by an astonishing margin.

Labour is expected to win 458 seats, out of Westminster’s 650. The Conservatives will hold a measly 90, with Farage’s populist “Reform UK” party right on their heels. The Conservatives may nominally be the 'opposition' but they’d utterly ineffectual; something closer to a government in exile from a country that no longer exists.

That is how Sunak will bring to a close 14 years of conservative rule. Well done.

But why? On his appointment as leader of the Conservative Party, following the tumultuous 49-day reign of Liz Truss — who has since unconvincingly tried to recast herself as a champion of Western populism — I breathed a sigh of relief. After a parade of clowns, finally, a competent leader. Sunak was a highly respected Chancellor of the Exchequer under floppy-haired Prime Minister Johnson, and earned a reputation among Westminster insiders as someone with a molecular understanding of his office and his policies.

He wasn't merely signing unread papers handed to him by staffers and rubber-stamping between luncheons and press conferences, as is the Downing Street norm. Rather, he knew his office inside out; who held all positions and what their roles were. Whereas most in Downing Street spend their days longingly staring at the Prime Minister’s chair, or plotting how to get into it, Sunak was the rare person who liked his job and was damn good at it.

Imagine the promise then in putting this head atop the entire UK government. Imagine the conservative agenda that could be passed. Finally free from European shackles, imagine a British government lead by someone believed in a vision of Britain as 'Singapore on the Thames,' and knew how to make it come true.

Imagine indeed.

Sunak's term has only been radical in its modesty. His government has hoped that controlling inflation would be enough to win the hearts and minds of the British public, but they couldn’t and didn’t. They then stumbled after Nigel Farage’s obsession on 'stopping the boats,’ but Sunak never cared much for the issue. So, he outsourced the policy to hard-liner Suella Braverman; someone who didn't care too much about him, and didn't know how to implement her policy, so spent her whole time in office throwing policies against the courts, being shot down, whining to anyone who would listen, then resigning. She’ll probably be his successor as leader of the Conservative Party.

In their re-election campaign, Sunak has bounced between publicity flubs — appearing at the Titanic ward as one of his first campaign stops, leaving D-day remembrance early for an ITV appearance, and so on — and failed in his attempt to portray Labour leader Keir Starmer as a leftist radical. Because he’s not. He’s just boring.

In fact, most Tory attempts to forecast Labour-lead national doom have only reminded the public of how poor Tory leadership has been, and how out of touch with they are from the average Brit. In the Telegraph, Conservative MP Robert Jenrick wrote that a “A Labour landslide would leave the UK unrecognisable,” turning the country into “a high-migration, low-growth, bureaucrat-led nation.” But that same line perfectly describes Britain's managed decline over the past 14 years. Immigration is up; growth is way down; and the bureaucratic quagmire is thicker than ever before.

People don’t love Starmer — as I say, he’s just a fundamentally boring man — but the consensus is “he can’t be much worse than this lot.” And he probably can’t. Meanwhile, the Tory plea to “give us one more chance, we’ll do better this time!” seems rather unconvincing. After all, they only had 14 years of chances to do a good job, and they’ve failed. Why would another four or five years be any different?

Looking in the rearview mirror, it would be easy to say my enthusiasm for Sunak was simply misplaced. Perhaps. But his fundamental qualities still could have made for an all-time great Prime Minister. He’s clever, unmarred by scandal, detail oriented, and when better to be lead by a Stanford MBA than during a time of economic depression? If only he had a spine.

Rather than making major improvements to his country, Sunak has spent his time in Downing Street quivering at the sight of newspapers, scared of what the press might say about him, never passing policy with any risk or ambition lest they slap him down.

Look at his secret meeting with Dominic Cummings, strategist mastermind of both the Brexit campaign and Johnson's electoral sweep. Cummings is intensely clever and prickly — more likely to give journalists a raised middle finger than a handshake — and has a unique ability to deftly identify the issues that winnable voters care about, which aren't being addressed by either Labour or establishment Conservative thought.

Johnson wisely deferred to Cummings on these matters — until he didn't during COVID, when everything was thrown in the air, and shortly after, out the Downing Street front door  — and with defeat on the horizon, Sunak decided to follow suit, calling a meeting with Cummings last December. Cummings was willing to win him the election for him, but only if Cummings was given the power to truly reform Britain’s stagnant government; and that cost was too much for Sunak’s weak back to bear.

As reported by Tim Shipman in The Times of London, Cummings advised Sunak to hold an emergency budget, reverse Johnson’s tax rises, and increase threshold for paying a higher income tax rate from £50,271 to £100,000. To properly separate from the EU in this post-Brexit era, he advised that Britain leaves the European Convention on Human Rights, giving the government more freedom in handling illegal immigrants. Additionally, he said that the government should launch an emergency national effort — inspired by the public-private collaboration on the Vaccine Taskforce — to radically reform and rebuild Britain’s crumbling health service, the NHS.

Finally, he would lead an effort to radically reform the Whitehall bureaucracy  — which has stifled Britain’s government, private sector, and markets — with a focus on pandemic control, updating our nuclear infrastructure, and preparing for AI and other new technologies.

In other words, policies that the voters care about and that the Tories have neglected for their fourteen years in power.

Sunak didn’t have any opposition to these policies. His opposition was in optics. He wanted Cummings to be a secret campaign strategist, and nothing more, and told Cummings that were he to follow his advice, “The MPs and the media will go crazy.” And that’s what matters most to Sunak.

To say Sunak is too cozy with the British press is to understate how closely he's cuddled with them. In the most galling example; James Forsyth was the political editor for Britain's most influential magazine, The Spectator, before being appointed as an adviser for Mr. Sunak in Downing Street.  He was best man at Mr. Sunak's wedding, just as Mr. Sunak was at his; they are the godfathers to each other's children; and the two best friends first met each other as school boys at Winchester College.

By contrast, his predecessor, the rabble-rousing, vino-swilling Prime Minister Johnson may have once been a journalist and editor — at The Spectator, incidentally — but he never gave much of a damn about the profession when he was in it, never mind as Prime Minister.

Perhaps that's why he won such a strong majority, and convinced the country to vote for Brexit.

For disclosure; I'm the Life Editor at the world edition of The Spectator, but have never communicated with Mr. Forsyth, Mr. Sunak, or Mr. Johnson, and publicly criticized Mr. Forsyth's closeness to Mr. Sunak long before I joined the magazine.