In Nairobi’s industrial South B district stands the Highway secondary school, alma mater of Rishi Sunak’s father. It was established for Asian boys in 1962, one year before Kenya’s independence, during a time when there were separate schools for whites, Asians and black Kenyans.
Days after Sunak became prime minister, the principal told the Kenyan press that his premiership was “an indication that with determination and focus, one can be anything in this world. We are not limited if the example of the UK premier is anything to go by.” The celebration reflected an aspirational approach to life, emerging from deep within the postcolonial experience, that conceives of the world in terms of centre and periphery, and in which success is defined by proximity to that centre. “Endeavour to excel”, the Highway school motto, is hand-painted neatly on a blue sash on its walls.
Standing outside the slightly weathered building last week, as the violent suppression of anti-government protests played out across Nairobi, it seemed to me that this striking journey over two generations, culminating in what will probably be Sunak’s final days in Downing Street, tells us a great deal about Britain, and a certain type of Conservative politician.
Sunak the man may seem like a cipher – political hinterland opaque, motivations unclear – but he is best understood as the product of a postcolonial, post-Thatcherite ideology that considers social mobility as the sum total of achievement. That achievement is secured not just through “determination and focus”, but through proximity and affinity with the establishment and its institutions.
In the world of Sunak’s father, British officials regarded Indians who moved to east Africa from south Asia as second class, but still planned to develop Kenya as “the America of the Hindu”, with middle-class Indians as intermediaries who would help the British lead Africans towards “civilisation”. That was the context from which east Africans of Indian origin came to the UK under favourable immigration regimes after African independence, and then had sons and daughters who are now so well represented in the Tory parliamentary party in Suella Braverman, Priti Patel and Sunak himself.
Those children’s upward trajectories were to varying degrees a function of their class and relative ease of entry to the UK, rather than of a country that presented equal opportunity for all. In the Conservative myth where hard work always pays off, there can be no acknowledgment that these were beneficiaries of a small window, swiftly shut in 1968 when the Commonwealth Immigration Act restricted citizenship in the UK to those born in the UK and their descendants. There can be no recognition of the fact that their parents’ occupations as business owners and white-collar professionals had some bearing on their children’s prospects. The challenges they faced, such as Priti Patel’s accounts of playground slurs, are referred to in order to give them a monopoly on defining the scale and nature of discrimination in Britain – never as an indication of structural hurdles that may have prevented others from thriving.
The result is an inspiring political narrative based on elision. The only time Sunak sounds genuine is when he talks about his gratitude to Britain for letting him get this far, and his belief that he represents something elemental about the country. On face value, his background was not one of economic or political privilege, and yet the centres of power seemed to welcome him and nurture his dreams. He loves to reminisce about helping his mother do the sums for the budget when he was young. Thatcher is his political hero. It all points to a man whose politics was shaped by rapid social mobility and accumulation of assets.
Even his decamping from finance to politics can be seen as a pursuit of that upward rise, rather than a downgrade. The country is the ultimate business, and running it the ultimate C-suite position that should be awarded to those who work hardest, and, like his hero, sleep least. Politics doesn’t work like that, and it is why he seems permanently frustrated: you don’t always get out what you put in. As you watch Sunak behave robotically with voters, tetchily with the media, or sneerily during election debates, the question you’re left with is always: “What are you doing here?” None of it seems enjoyable or his natural forte. He has the air of a man dragged out of the boardroom to appease the factory floor, biting his tongue when all he wants is to tell the labourers to get back to work.
There is an element of tragedy, then, to his undoing. In the lead-up to the final humiliation of electoral defeat, he has suffered serial others. Celebrated as the first brown prime minister, he still had to endure constant low-grade racialised taunts. Tiny Rishi. A “sulking schoolboy”. His skinny trousers a constant obsession, but still, the “least of his problems” when everything about him is “shrunken, inauthentic, ill-fitting, bogus and wrong”. He is unpatriotic Rishi too, for leaving D-day events early. Or openly called a “fucking [P-word]” by a canvasser on the Reform campaign trail.
And yet he has always shut his eyes and ears to years of Tory policies and rhetoric that created a friendly environment for political alienation, economic marginalisation, and the sort of xenophobia and racism that nourishes parties like Reform and which hurts so deeply when directed towards him. Snookered by the results of his own economic ideology, he resorted to wading into the mire of culture war and embracing the nastiest of policies, the Rwanda scheme, as his central cause. He did so with the cold, bullying zeal of someone for whom the ends justify the means no matter what calamities they bring down on the heads of others en route to the top.
Solipsistic to the end, he has been hindered by that failure to see that his politics are the result of a particular and subjective experience. One that was fashioned in the colonial heartlands, greased by freedom of movement, blessed by good health, education, a middle-class springboard, and an economy more friendly to those in financial speculation and investment banking than it is to teachers, nurses and public sector workers. After Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, Sunak could not clean up the wreckage because he was the wreckage; unable to understand or acknowledge profound national inequality, the rot at the heart of the Tory party, or those ideological beliefs that deliver less and less for more and more. To admit that the model is broken would be to admit that he is not its poster child, but its cautionary tale.
And so he hurtles, tight-jawed and relentless, into the void, his political obituary written before he even lived it. A man with no one to mourn him. There will be no misty-eyed “if onlys”, such as I heard from several Tory voters who still wish Johnson could have shown some humility and ridden out Partygate. By the generous, Sunak might be remembered as a man for whom the task of rehabilitating the Tory party was simply too large, as his MPs and membership succumbed to the long tail of the Brexit wars. But the truth is that he was running a party and a country that existed only in his own head. A politician who learned all the wrong lessons from the odyssey that the school principal in Nairobi saw as the triumph of the subaltern.
In reality, Sunak is the prime minister that never was, telling and retelling a political story that was more specific personal fiction than universal political fact. A winner turned loser, confounded by his stubbornly limited reading of the system that got him there. An aspirant who doggedly raced to ultimate power only to find it was all a mirage, forever fading the closer he came to it.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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