Rishi Sunak has kept the lowest of public profiles since leaving Downing Street in July. As leader of the opposition, he has made only essential Commons appearances. Although party leader, he barely attended the Conservative conference at all. If he had called the election as late as some assumed he would, Mr Sunak might still be prime minister today. Instead, you could be forgiven for having almost forgotten him.
From this weekend, though, when either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick will take over, Mr Sunak will become history. His Commons reply to Rachel Reeves’ budget speech on Wednesday is his last important appearance as party leader. After that, who knows? It seems unlikely that Mr Sunak will want to serve in the new shadow cabinet. During the election campaign, he promised he would stay as an MP for a full parliamentary term. Many nevertheless assume, though, that he will quit Westminster much sooner, perhaps for California.
Mr Sunak has had a remarkably brief career at the summit of British politics. He only became an MP for the first time nine years ago, succeeding William Hague in 2015 in the North Yorkshire seat now called Richmond and Northallerton. Three years later he was a junior minister, and a year after that a cabinet minister. In 2020 he was chancellor, and in 2022 prime minister. Still only 44, he is now quietly closing the political door as he leaves altogether, but with perhaps half of his life in front of him.
Mr Sunak’s eventual fate may be as one of Britain’s less celebrated prime ministers. But he should be remembered for three things. One is as Britain’s first ever Hindu prime minister, and our first of Asian heritage. By any standards, this was a formidable achievement, of which he is rightly proud, as this country can also be. The second was his family riches. The third is as the man who led the Tory party to its worst election defeat in parliamentary history, losing 251 seats and being reduced to 121 MPs.
Mr Sunak made mistakes that made the 2024 debacle worse. He had no enthusiasm for either levelling up or decarbonisation. But he also faced an impossible task when he took over in 2022. Boris Johnson’s authority had been destroyed by Partygate, while Liz Truss’s blew up just as she launched. The post-Brexit Tory party was probably unmanageable under any leader, let alone one with minimal room for manoeuvre. Even so, Mr Sunak was probably the party’s least bad option at the time.
The worm in the bud, though, was his deep belief in deregulation and small government, just at a time when the public demanded an end to both. Paradoxically, this belief endured in spite of his own embrace, as chancellor, of increased state spending to protect the economy during Covid and to cap energy price increases caused by the Ukraine war. But Conservative ideological fixation meant that this paved the way for Labour’s victory, not a Tory recovery.
In the end, Mr Sunak is departing for the same reason that his party lost. Neither he nor it had convincing solutions to what their doctrines had actually done to Britain: its ever-growing wealth gulf, its lack of investment and productivity, and its shockingly depleted public realm; the very things that this week’s budget must now address. Like his would-be successors, Mr Sunak offered only the same old same old. He was a historic figure. But he was out of touch with history.
