Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Red Rishi: the Prime Minister’s political makeover

What kind of conservative is Rishi Sunak? This time last year, there was a clear answer: he was a fiscal hawk who was worried about how much the government had to borrow to fund the Covid crisis. As chancellor, he was always fighting with the prime minister over high spending. When Sunak tried to raise the national insurance rate, he did so partly to send his party an important message: the borrowing and spending has to stop.

Now Sunak is in No. 10 and Boris Johnson isn’t around to demand more spending. There has been a Budget and a list of priorities – and Sunak’s agenda is starting to emerge. It includes a tax burden not just higher than any time in the 1970s, but any time in postwar history. A record proportion of the workforce are paying the higher rate of tax. These are government interventions that Tories would have once mocked. Now they are happening every day under Prime Minister Sunak. 

At the next election, how can Sunak show that the Tories have a different way of seeing things to Labour?

On the surface, it seems as if few British politicians embody the capitalist spirit more than Sunak. He is the richest MP ever to become prime minister. He is a graduate of Stanford business school and a former Goldman Sachs man. He has been called ‘out of touch’ by his opponents for his various luxuries, such as his £180 temperature-controlled ‘smart mug’ and his heated swimming pool at his constituency home. But he doesn’t shy away from talking about the merits of markets and money. He reveres Silicon Valley and speaks unabashedly about ‘economic freedom and prosperity’. 

How did this ultra-capitalist find himself anywhere near one of the most economically illiterate proposals on the planet – price controls on ‘basic’ supermarket items? No. 10

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