We should not giggle as we like
Betjeman, “The Wykehamist”
At his appearance on his bike;
It’s something to become a bore,
And more than that, at twenty-four
Can a party leader and prime minister resign during an election campaign? (Someone call Channel 6 and ask that Puglisi kid. He knows.) It’s a miracle this scenario is looking not impossible after Rishi Sunak failed to brainstorm about leaving the beach at Omaha on D-Day. Sunak left commemorations early, attending the first part with King Charles but leaving Foreign Secretary David Cameron to attend with other world leaders during the second part.
This has not gone down well, to say the least. The last person to leave D-Day early was Rommel (Peter FitzSimons’ favourite Nazi general), in charge of coastal defences, who departed for three days’ holiday on June 5, 1944. It has proved about as successful for Sunak, widely seen by Tories and non-Tories alike as a bit of a carpetbagging spiv, and who had attempted to establish his Britishness by offering the return of national service if reelected.
That policy, unwanted by both youf and the military, was solely designed to appease the grumpy old Tory vote and stop them drifting to the UK Reform party, now headed (as your correspondent forecast) by Nigel Farage, who is standing unsuccessfully for Clacton-on-Sea. Now Sunak has done the one thing that will make it simply impossible for them to vote for him, just an absolute kick in the guts.
Sunak’s decision to leave the D-Day commemorations is one of those political events that seem inexplicable on the face. What can possibly account for it? King Charles had departed early, but this was always going to occur. The US and European elected leaders were always going to attend the later part, an affirmation of D-Day’s celebration as a fight by democratic forces against fascism. That was the whole point of the UK prime minister being there. He would be literally standing in for Winston Churchill.
So it can neither be accounted for as a mix-up about who was doing what, nor a pre-booked interview he couldn’t get out of, nor as a brutal political decision that the ITV interview was more politically important. The obvious conclusion is that D-Day’s importance was not “internalised” by Sunak. There wasn’t within him a notion of the event’s sacredness, one that would stop the thought of cutting out early from even forming. I mean where did he think he was, Dunkirk?
What no-one is really saying, from either left or right, is that Sunak had not internalised an unquestioning sacredness of the event because he is not Anglo-Celtic British, and it simply does not have the same meaning to him — or, even for the most cynical (Boris Johnston cough cough), that it rang some warning bell.
Before the shouting starts, let me explain. Sunak would, of course, say he is as British as anyone, born in Southampton in 1980, and of course he is. He would say he believes in the greatness of Britain, that he is part of its evolving identity, and of course he is. And that he believes in its historical mission as good, with a few blemishes. And of course he does.
But Sunak can go for years without having to think deeply about this. He has largely come to politics through the world of business — rather than through the community/neighbourhood politics on the Labour side — and gives a strong impression of thinking of history as bunk. Capitalism is an eternal present, money has no memory.
Sunak shows an outsized identification with the Old Dart. He is a Wykehamist (that alone shows the Tory Party was losing its touch) and was head boy there. He did PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at Oxford and was a student Conservative in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the first time non-Anglos were able to fight through the white privilege in conservatism — not a little due to the ascent of New Labour, and the likelihood of the Tories being in opposition for a decade. He did an MBA at Stanford, and was part of the US and global financial scene, working for Goldman Sachs and others.
By this, and marriage, he is fantastically wealthy. He is a global subject who affirmed his mainstream Britishness early, steering away from any dissident identity.
But as a descendant of former colonial subjects, can you ever fully repress some basic divergence from the total affirmation of the West’s regard for itself? Sunak’s parents were born in Kenya and (then) Tanganyika, but their families immigrated from Punjab, a centre for anti-British resistance after World War I, and the place of what is still mostly known as the Amritsar massacre (now known as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, where the British army gunned down hundreds of peaceful protesters).
If one uses its old name, it is because most people instantly get its importance. The Amritsar massacre was the global turning point, the moment at which the British lost any claim to moral legitimacy — in which until the 1910s they had had substantial support — in ruling a whole civilisation. Amritsar is usually thought of in Ghandi’s grim joking reference to the question of what he thought of Western civilisation: that it would be a good idea.
Whether his parents or grandparents retained a dissident view, or became Commonwealth loyalists of a certain type, doesn’t matter much. For any Indian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or other, any story of the UK’s radiant goodness due to its World War II role is going to be tricky. The UK wouldn’t offer anything the Indian independence movements could accept in the 1920s and ’30s; it refused anything except the most limited home rule in the 1940s. The British Empire was used as a source of men, materiel and food to fight Nazism, culminating in the Bengal famine, a mix of noxious racism, fuelling incompetence and indifference to local conditions that caused three million deaths in 1943.
Did something in Sunak, some remnant attachment, cause him to flinch at the last minute, to take an engagement, already calendared but easily cancelled, and use that as a cover to shield from himself a refusal to consent to this ultimate glorification of the West’s narcissism, its glorification of a brutal intra-European struggle, as the pivotal moment of the 20th century?
But of course, no-one in the political commentary milieu will even think of it — for two reasons. The first is the simple lack of interest in any sort of psychological complexity in political discourse. Australia is worse on this than anywhere, but the UK is also pretty bad. A country that has had Boris Johnson followed by Liz Truss, and now Rishi bombing on the beach, seems to have no way of talking about a series of leaders who have no desire to do what was once Conservatism’s remit: to govern, until the end of time.
Not that it should be used for political point-scoring. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has gone there, talking about Sunak as a rootless cosmopolitan who doesn’t understand national values — assailing, or so he claims, Sunak’s globetrotting finance life. Farage would be the last person to raise the possibility that it is precisely Sunak’s residual loyalties that made his “D-dayparture” so likely.
But it is indicative of the “general unconscious” (not collective; we’re not Jungians, for godsakes) of the election, which is that the Conservatives may be about to get an extra shellacking — not simply because of the destructive negligence and nihilism of Boris, the neo-Thatcher ideologism of Liz Truss, and not simply because the European immigration they stopped with Brexit had been replaced with global immigration. It’s because, all of a sudden, the country — still an Anglo-dominated, very settled/embedded country — appears to be run by British-Asians. It’s just hilarious that no-one comments on this, even neutrally, asking what it might mean for how people see things are ruled, etc, etc.
The lack of questioning is in part because it’s all topsy turvy, according to conventional politics. Labour, meant to be the progressive party, has produced no female leader, and its leadership, headed by Sir Keir Starmer, remains overwhelmingly Anglo. Diane Abbott, member for Hackney — a Black woman — has had to fight to retain preselection due to her alliance with Jeremy Corbyn. Meanwhile, the Tories seem like they’re run by the non-whites, for whom many Tories, working- and middle-class, have no more love than they had for EU immigrants.
This cannot not be a factor in what is looking to be an epic collapse for the Tories — made worse by Sunak’s Dunkirk spew-it — but it also cannot be mentioned. On D-Day, all these silences appear to have landed on the beach at Omaha.
What now? There was talk of Sunak being “despondent” after the D-Day stuff up. No. But could he seriously be replaced? By who? David Cameron? There’s almost no-one else, as everyone is leaving politics. Penny Mordaunt, whose chief qualification is holding the sword steady during the coronation while dressed like an Air Macedonia hostess? My suggestion would be Lord Privy Seal, who is now known, I kid you not, as The Lord True (having been plain old Nick True). Ah, Britain. Where everyone sounds like a superhero (Lord Adonis!) and no-one can lick a stamp without bleeding to death from a paper cut. How ironic that Sunak, this oleaginous finance industry spiv, a bore at twenty-four, might be well and truly finished by a single act of unconscious decency he was unable to control.
Could this latest “gaffe”, plus Farage, really take the Tories below a hundred seats? Thus giving the UK a Labour government like the Albanese government on steroids? Oh goody. Whatever happens, it is surely going to be a disaster for the Tories and Sunak. On your bike, Rishi!
