Last week, a visibly chilled Rishi Sunak stood outside 10 Downing Street in the pouring rain and announced to an apathetic nation that a general election would be held on July 4th, months earlier than expected. “Now is the time for Britain to choose its future,” he said, water soaking his suit.
That Sunak’s team seemingly couldn’t even think of moving the event indoors, or even giving Sunak an umbrella, is rather emblematic of the situation the Conservatives find themselves in. Perhaps Sunak’s party is more than 20 points behind the opposition Labour Party and has given up and wants to get it over with. Or perhaps the latest economic outlook makes it seem unlikely that a planned September cut in electoral bribing taxes will go ahead, so the idea of hanging on until the autumn suddenly looks less appealing.
Either way, by bringing forward the election, Sunak has played his final card. This somber, dejected moment will mark the beginning of the end of his career in British politics, after a dizzyingly rapid rise to the top. And his legacy may be one of a reminder that getting everything you want too quickly is a very bad idea.
After a successful career in finance, Sunak became an MP in 2015 and publicly supported Leave during the Brexit referendum, despite many of the party’s rising stars being loyal to the leadership and supporting Remain. This proved to be a wise career decision. By 2018, he had his first ministerial job, and in 2019, after co-authoring a sycophantic newspaper article in The Times titled “The Conservative Party is in Serious Crisis. Only Boris Johnson can save us”, he was made Undersecretary of the Treasury in Johnson’s government. After Johnson had a bitter falling out with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak was installed as a submissive and calculating replacement.
Sunak’s smart suits and seemingly calm demeanor during the pandemic stood in stark contrast to Johnson’s chaotic bombast. By the time Johnson became embroiled in several scandals, Sunak had looked like a likely successor. His loss in the leadership contest to Liz Truss should have been an early clue to his weakness. But then Truss lit a fire under her own premiership, and Sunak was hastily appointed to succeed him in October 2022 when his only rival withdrew. At 42, Sunak is the youngest prime minister in more than 200 years.
The problem with this surge has been clear since his time in Downing Street. Mr Sunak has never overseen a department like health or education and doesn’t understand how public institutions work. It may explain why he promised to reduce NHS waiting lists to record lows but then refused to negotiate with striking doctors, making that impossible. It may also shed light on plans to baffle former government officials to deport thousands of asylum seekers to Rwanda, regardless of where they came from. Whatever you think about the ethics of this policy, it was never going to work.
As the election campaign got underway in earnest, his inexperience with national campaigning also became apparent. Conservative MPs have struggled to rally together, with many particularly surprised by the earlier election date. One MP who had planned a holiday to Greece decided to go anyway, reportedly saying it was for a “much-needed break”.
He has no charm or charisma and can come across as defensive and sulky in interviews. In response to a heated question about poverty on a popular daytime TV show, he launched into an arguing that it should be made more difficult for children to access social media.
Sunak has also made it difficult for voters to clearly understand where he stands. One of the greatest ironies of this parliament is that Sunak is often seen by Johnson’s supporters as a centrist technocrat, even though he is ideologically to the right of Johnson. Perhaps this is because of the breadth of his interests: he has spoken on a variety of topics, from techno-utopianism about an AI future to tax cuts, anti-smoking and high school education reform.
The combination of a confused policy agenda, inexperience and lack of basic political acumen was always going to be damaging, but as he nears the end of 14 troubled years of Conservative government, his party is facing a genuine existential crisis: it is heading for the worst defeat in its history.
For Britons, the next few weeks will be depressing. The National Health Service is on the brink of collapse, several local authorities have declared local bankruptcy (with more expected), Britain’s prisons are running out of space, economic growth is sluggish, and the UK needs a real dialogue about the future of Britain that neither party wants.
Labour, already with a big lead, would prefer to avoid big mistakes and point to the failure of more than a decade of Conservative government, rather than do anything significant to improve the lives of their voters. And the Conservatives won’t want to talk about it because it is the failure of more than a decade of Conservative government. Instead, they are promising to reinstate national service for 18-year-olds and give $3 billion in tax cuts to pensioners if re-elected, a blunt pitch to older voters who might be considering voting for the upstart right-wing Reform Party. (And both are designed to stave off defeat, not to win elections.)
There will be little mention of Brexit, which most Britons now consider a failure: too unpopular for the Conservatives to claim it was a success, and not unpopular enough for Labour to attack it without alienating Leave voters.
How Labour approaches the challenges of governing will depend in part on the size of its majority and the room for maneuver it has. Mr Sunak has at least given Labour a useful lesson in what not to do. If the rumours are true – which he denies – he will leave politics after the election and return to finance, probably in the US. People think he’ll be much happier that way.
