Good morning. We have our third prime minister of 2022 – and, who knows, maybe the last. After days of high soap operatics, Rishi Sunak’s victory, ensured after Penny Mordaunt fell short of the 100 nomination threshold and withdrew from the Tory leadership race, came without much drama. He would love to keep things that way. It was the end of the “anarchic, punk rock ‘let’s trash the establishment’ of Trussonomics,” wrote John Crace. “We were moving into a new era of the carefully curated bloodless boyband, with Sunak as the frontman.”
Sunak is not an unknown quantity – but he arrives in No 10 after an abridged leadership fight with no scrutiny of his prescription to resolve the crises of the last six weeks. Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s Whitehall editor Rowena Mason, is about what we do know about Sunak: his policy agenda, his political weaknesses and how he hopes to turn the page on a year of Conservative pandemonium. Here are the headlines.
