Katy Balls Katy Balls

The polite radical: Rishi Sunak on economic repair, migrants and faith

[Morten Morland]

After Rishi Sunak lost the summer Tory leadership contest, he started on Plan B: to be selected for the Kirby Sigston cricket team in his Yorkshire constituency. He had hoped to play for the club when he was first elected as an MP seven years ago, but politics got in the way. Suddenly with more time on his hands, he began to enquire about this ‘friendly, sociable and inclusive’ team – only to find out that its inclusivity had its limits. ‘They told me that I shouldn’t assume I could make the starting XI, because they’d won their league for two years in a row. They said I might have to go and play for the next village down.’

Sunak started practising, but did not in the end try out. Liz Truss resigned after just 44 days in office and he was parachuted in by Tory MPs in the hope that he could unite the party and calm the markets with a less radical Budget. ‘We achieved it in two-and-a-half weeks, it passed parliament with very significant majorities and the country is supportive of the plan we have put in place,’ he says. ‘The Chancellor [Jeremy Hunt] is due enormous credit for putting together a plan that has worked. Whether it’s currency, yields or anything else, you can see the general calmness it has brought. It has worked. That, I think, is a point to reflect on.’

The bond markets had actually already settled by the time the Autumn Statement was announced – in the expectation that Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs financier, would balance the books. But he did so by lifting the tax-and-spend levels to the largest in peacetime history, via a five-year austerity plan that looks set to start with two years of recession and the sharpest fall in living standards since records began.

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