Rishi Sunak has been prime minister for slightly more than a year, but it is probably fair to say that many voters still do not have much sense of what sort of leader he is. This is, in part, because of his fondness for sometimes contradictory policy resets. But it is also something more fundamental about Sunak, a political opaqueness on to which voters – and MPs – can project their own wishes. So who is the real Sunak? We have seen quite a few versions already.
The big-spending empathiser
This is the incarnation many voters initially encountered, when Sunak, still only five years into his Commons career, was the face of the furlough scheme as Boris Johnson’s chancellor during Covid. As a political first impression it was not altogether bad.
The scheme – officially two schemes: furlough to protect people’s jobs, and another programme to support those who were self-employed – saw Sunak give away over £70bn of public money, and was generally deemed a success.
Covid also gave Sunak a chance to show his human side at Covid press conferences, where his sober if quietly reassuring bedside manner was a notable contrast to Johnson’s tendency to bombast and glibness.
The citizen of nowhere
A less flattering image emerged later in Sunak’s time as chancellor, when it emerged first that his wife, Akshata Murty, had non-domiciled status for UK taxes, and then that Sunak himself had held a US green card even while at the Treasury.
Sunak’s wealth was not a secret – Murty is the daughter of the billionaire founder of the Indian tech company Infosys – but these details, plus reporting on the family’s £5m home in Santa Monica, left an abiding impression of someone not in touch with everyday life, and even, perhaps, not entirely committed to their UK political career.
This is a version of Sunak that has lingered with the public, and has become a ubiquitous trope for his political opponents. A word cloud created by the More in Common thinktank for October’s Conservative conference, giving voters’ responses when asked what Sunak stands for, had “rich” within the three top answers, and included the word itself in a giant font.
The details-obsessed technocrat
Sunak’s elevation into Downing Street in October last year happened largely because of what he was not, at least in the minds of Conservative MPs. He was not a tax-cutting ideologue in the vein of Liz Truss, whose government had imploded after 45 days. Nor was he a chaotic narcissist, like Boris Johnson, who was plotting a return to No 10.
The idea of Sunak being managerial, even micro-managerial, is not entirely false. When in meetings with officials, Sunak has a fondness for asking them their view on a tiny detail buried in the middle of a document, demonstrating how he has, in a very unJohnson-like way, completely absorbed the brief.
This might give the impression that as prime minister, Sunak would take a distinctly pragmatic and non-ideological approach to problems. It did happen in some areas, for example his painstaking tweaks to the Northern Ireland protocol. But it was only ever part of the story.
The hard-right culture warrior
When Sunak toured hustings events for the summer 2022 Conservative leadership race, in which he lost to Truss, a regular part of his stump speech was a brief foray into trans rights in which he promised to stand up for “our women”. It sounded deeply awkward, and many observers simply assumed this was not the real Sunak, just what he felt was needed to win over party members.
But the longer Sunak has spent in No 10 the more it seems that this was his authentic voice. At more or less every point in his premiership, given a choice between a more socially liberal or culture war-leaning stance, he has opted for the latter, on everything from trans rights to immigration, drugs or protests.
Perhaps the peak was October’s Conservative conference, where a string of Sunak-appointed ministers spread conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities and Labour plans for a meat tax, while the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, gave a speech so ideological and populist that one delegate – a Tory member of the London assembly – quietly heckled her and was thrown out.
The tech bro
This identity is, to an extent, a close cousin to Sunak-as-technocrat, and also to his non dom-cossetted wealth, particularly given the family bolthole in California. It is also, in some ways, the element of the prime minister which is most unambiguously genuine.
Sunak is very conversant with technology, regaling journalists in private with long and jargon-heavy expositions about the risks and potential benefits of artificial intelligence. He expended a lot of time and effort setting up his international AI summit at the second world war codebreaking centre of Bletchley Park.
So obviously does Sunak enjoy this world that many pundits, and some MPs, predict that if ousted at the next election he will not hang around Westminster as a backbencher, but renew his green card and head off to a Nick Clegg-like lucrative career with a US tech company.
The one-nation Cameroon
This is a side of Sunak represented by just one decision, albeit a fairly big one: bringing David Cameron out of the post-Downing Street half life of book writing and global consulting to make him foreign secretary and a peer.
Cameron is arguably quite like Sunak as prime minister in that he was much more ideological and right wing than his public image suggested. But putting him in the Foreign Office as part of a reshuffle that included the sacking of Braverman was seen as a clear message to the Tory right.
Cameron’s presence might not nudge Sunak’s government further to the centre, but having him there, as well as making the generally undoctrinaire James Cleverly home secretary, does point to a No 10 less likely to try radical right-leaning moves such as quitting the European convention on human rights. But as with everything else for Sunak, it is hard to tell, and he may reinvent himself all over again.
