The Tories are finally coming to see what has long been plain to the rest of us: Rishi Sunak is a dud. He’s not a walking catastrophe like Liz Truss but he’s hopelessly out of touch, helplessly out of his depth and has no plan for turning things around. His conversation with a homeless man at a shelter, in which the Prime Minister chirpily enquired whether the bloke was a business owner, has been somewhat misrepresented by Labour and its colleagues in the activist media. Sunak did not blurt out his silly question from nowhere: the man had been questioning him about his management of the economy and the benefits to London of a booming financial sector.
Still, unless the PM suspected he was in a very tasteless episode of The Secret Millionaire, it was absurd to ask a man queuing for free Christmas scran about commerce and finance. James Forsyth, formerly of this parish, will still be finding his feet in No. 10 but he might want to have a word with whoever thought it was a good idea to have our mega-rich PM doling out grub to the poor and indigent at a homeless shelter. Of all the ways to position Sunak at Christmas, a reincarnated Mr Bumble, plating up gruel at the workhouse, was certainly a choice.
It’s unfair, of course, that Sunak’s fortune counts against him. It’s not his fault he married the daughter of an Indian tech billionaire. But if you’re going to have a Tory prime minister during a cost-of-living crisis, one who snatched back £20 a week from families on Universal Credit, I’m afraid he can’t be Scrooge McDuck, diving into his vault of gold while the poors struggle to keep their homes heated over Christmas.
This is not simply about ‘optics’. It’s about the character and political instincts of the man himself. As one observer opined on Coffee House a while back:
Whatever his qualities, however popular he might be with the Tory press, Sunak is George Osborne 2.0, a globo-liberal Thatcherite, all tax cuts and trips to Davos. That was acceptable in the Eighties, you could just about get away with it in the 2010s, but in 2022 the appetite for market metropolitanism doesn’t extend much beyond the readership of the FT.
The problem, in the end, is not that Sunak is worth the annual GDP of Samoa. It’s that he combines the perception he is out of touch with the fact of actually being out of touch. His life is so far removed from that of the average Briton that it leads him to advance policies whose impact he couldn’t begin to comprehend. The distance is not merely financial; it reflects a prime minister who appears not to believe anything beyond the unsentimental pounds and pennies of fiscal policy.
Sunak couldn’t be called a conservative, for his worldview bears no concern for tradition, virtue, family, community coherence, institutions or how all these can be ordered towards man living the good life. Nor does he display a lively spirit of libertarianism, driven by moral imperative to shrink the state and expand the scope of personal liberty. He appears to have no philosophy beyond the fiscal rationalism and Whiggish optimism of global liberal capitalism. It’s like the Economist set up a chatbot that accidentally got elected Prime Minister.
Sunak’s not a bad man, he’s just the wrong man for the job in the current climate. If the best the Tories can manage at this time of acute crisis is a man utterly remote from ordinary British life, perhaps it’s time for that party to be remote from the levers of power for a term or two.
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