Rishi Sunak has been an MP since 2015 and has never known the indignity of opposition, or even the frustration of a slow track to ministerial office. He was chancellor of the exchequer within five years. That rate of promotion looked extraordinary from the outside. To its beneficiary it must have felt consistent with a record of precocious academic and professional achievement.
To observe the rapidity of the ascent is not to pass judgment on whether it was deserved. Sunak is smart, industrious and adept enough to have run the Treasury in trying circumstances. Enough Conservative MPs admired those qualities to install him as prime minister without a contest and in rebuke to their own members who had preferred Liz Truss only months before and who, given the chance, would probably have reinstated Boris Johnson.
