The first time I heard Rishi Sunak’s name was from William Hague, in Pushkar’s Indian restaurant in Birmingham.
It was almost ten years ago, at a dinner for the outgoing Foreign Secretary that some of us had thrown for him during the Tory party conference.
Hague, who was stepping down, was purring in delight about his newly- selected successor in his North Yorkshire seat of Richmond.
“Hugely impressive young man”, and “a very bright future in the party” were two phrases he used about Sunak, a total political unknown at the time.
Hague was right. Less than six years after that dinner, Sunak was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Two years later from that, he became Britain’s first Asian-heritage PM, at the age of just 42.
Even then, he was still being called “Dishy Rishi” and was widely assumed to be his creaking party’s sensible salvation.
This week, just 20 months on, he notched up a personal approval rating of minus 54, the second worst for a Tory leader ever (after Liz Truss’s minus 70). Sunak was branded “an absolute dud” by defecting former Tory donor John Caudwell. And in 13 days time, rafts of shuddering polls predicted he will oversee the worst Conservative general election defeat since 1906.
So where on earth did it all go wrong for Rishi Sunak?
It must be said it’s a bad time to be an incumbent. They’re taking a kicking everywhere, from Macron and Scholz in France and Germany to Modi in India, South Africa’s ANC, and Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump in the US. Sky high prices after three years of painful inflation and flatlining economies sparked by the pandemic and Ukraine are killing them.
Sunak’s substantial personal wealth has also hurt him. Timing is everything in politics, and a prolonged cost of living crisis could not be worse for a Prime Minister who is richer than the King.
Then there is Sunak’s personal character. Few doubt he is well-meaning, very intelligent and extremely hard- working, but he can also be tetchy, and that betrays an arrogance. Worse than that, he’s a natural born wonk and seriously struggles to emotionally connect with his audience. The harder he tries, the more insincere he can sound.
With all that is going against Sunak, and it is a lot, was he sunk from the start? Well no, I don’t think he was actually
And why on earth any of his aides still haven’t drummed out of him his deeply grating American habit of saying “right” at the end of sentences I cannot fathom. Brits have an acute ear for such things. Nothing screams “‘loaded transatlantic sort who doesn’t understand my problems”’ more.
Then there is the appalling state of the Conservative Party that Sunak has inherited. A party teetering on self-implosion, riven by years of infighting and ill-discipline, where venal self-interest too often topped the nation’s.
With all that going against Sunak, and it is a lot, was he sunk from the start? Well no, I don’t think he was actually. A senior Labour Party strategist shared his party’s thinking with me on this, and I agree with it.
Privately, Starmer’s team was very worried by Sunak when he took power, because he looked like the change candidate. He signalled a return to traditional Tory moderation, and a clean break from the chaos of his predecessors. According to the Labour strategist, the key moment for Sunak was the direction he set during his first few months in charge.
“We were so relieved he didn’t try to revert back to the Cameron / Major ground, which was our biggest worry when he took over,” he said.
“He should have denounced Truss immediately and abandoned all the potty stuff like Rwanda, that voters knew was never going to work. But he just ploughed on with all of it.”
What Sunak did instead, disastrously, was to try to hold Boris Johnson’s 2019 electoral coalition together. He failed to accept it was a one-off, forged uniquely by Corbyn and Brexit, and by 2022 it had already collapsed. That left the new PM’s offer ludicrously broad. Rwanda and less net zero for the Red Wall, and AI, maths to 18 and tax cuts for the blue heartlands. Sunak ruled by focus group, trying to please all of the people all of the time. That left his policy offer looking disingenuous and his credibility melted away.
Abandoning the new Tory Right would have meant a big bust-up with them. Why didn’t Sunak do that and define himself, as Keir Starmer did by defeating the Corbynista Left?
“Rishi’s biggest problem was he was always too afraid of a fight,” one of his ministers told me. “He always backed away from taking on the barons, in the party or the civil service. That meant he couldn’t really get anything done.”
Sunak faced significant headwinds yes, but he had a clear shot at defeating Starmer, who remains unloved to this day. The overwhelming thing he had in his favour was he was the PM. He was in charge, and that meant he could make choices.
To lead is to choose. What really sunk Sunak was that he chose not to.
The silence of the ex-PMs... and Boris’s nickname for Penny
While election successes have many fathers, you lose them alone.
Rishi Sunak must be thinking just that as he contemplates the silence of the ex-Tory PMs. They’re usually wheeled out as heavy artillery at various strategic stages. But in this election campaign, their silence is deafening.
There are five of them alive. David Cameron still has the Foreign Secretary’s beat so has to maintain a limited public profile.
John Major, Theresa May and Liz Truss though have not done one broadcast interview between them (probably in Truss’s case, with immense gratitude from CCHQ). Neither has Boris Johnson, once the party’s greatest living electoral asset. Not even with GB News, the station he is contracted to appear on.
It emerged this week that while Boris has agreed to sign some round robin letters to voters, he won’t be making any election stump appearances. On cue, as BoJo celebrated his 60th birthday, his wife Carrie posted snaps of the couple and their children on a sun-kissed Sardinia beach.
Boris is still making Tory friends from afar though. I’m told that he has taken to calling leadership hopeful Penny Mordaunt “the massive-titted six footer”.
It’s Clive vs Laura for the big BBC moment
Anticipation is bubbling over inside the BBC over whether Laura Kuenssberg or Clive Myrie will get the top job on election night. The pair have been unveiled as joint anchors for the corporation’s coverage. But only one can do the key box office moment: the exit poll when voting closes on the dot of 10pm. T“It’s a massive decision,” says one BBC political staffer.
Save the odd high profile defenestration, the exit poll is the only moment that history remembers from election nights.
For the presenters, it’s also career defining, as it was for Huw Edwards in 2019 and David Dimbleby for four decades before him.
This year, it will cement one or the other as the new leading face of the BBC.
