People who work with him at Number 10 depict Rishi Sunak as a workaholic nerd who is most alive when he’s scrolling through a spreadsheet or burrowing into the appendix of a briefing document. Critics mean it as an insult when they call him “a technocrat”, but he takes it as a compliment.
He has no gift for poetic oratory. Nor any talent for clever wisecracks or sizzling zingers. He can’t do what George HW Bush once called “the vision thing”. The Tory leader thinks of himself as a problem-solver and that’s how he’s been projected to the public since he arrived in Downing Street. Competence and delivery were supposed to be the motifs of his premiership. In his early months in post, Labour people got a bit windy when polling suggested his managerial image had some appeal to voters repelled by the debaucheries of Boris Johnson and the mayhem of Liz Truss.
