Rishi Sunak’s campaign to be prime minister was over before it began. Too many Conservative Party members had their doubts about him. Two surveys of them were carried out on 7 July, the day Boris Johnson announced that he would stand down as prime minister.
In one by YouGov, Mr Sunak was five points behind Liz Truss in a series of possible head-to-head contests; in the other, by Opinium, he was four points ahead. This was before Conservative MPs were balloted to produce the shortlist of two, and many people, including me, assumed that support for Mr Sunak would grow as the campaign progressed. Instead, as he coasted through the MPs’ stage of the election to his place in the final two, opinion among party members was moving in the other direction.
We can see now, looking back at other YouGov polls carried out while MPs were voting, that not only was he likely to lose to Truss; he would probably have lost to Penny Mordaunt or Kemi Badenoch, if one of them had emerged as the other candidate in the final round.
His fundamental problem was that he had raised taxes as chancellor, basking in the adulation of the sensible people, which allowed him to be outflanked by any other candidate offering pie-in-the-sky tax cuts. Party members, bewildered by years of Cameronian modernisation, Mayite deadlock and Johnsonist statism, yearned for a mythical golden age of true Conservatism. Mr Sunak said he was a Thatcherite, but his record said otherwise, and he seemed to be more aligned with the Remainer elite than was Ms Truss, who had actually voted Remain.
He had been brilliant during the pandemic and his performances in the Commons impressed his fellow MPs but many party members felt uneasy about some of his language. He sounded like a Labour chancellor when at the Tory party conference in 2020 he promised the nation that “the overwhelming might of the British state will be placed at your service”.
And when it came to paying the bill afterwards, he could never decide whether he was proud to be raising taxes to pay for the NHS, or whether he had been forced to put up taxes by the spendthrift lunatic in No 10 to whom he was chained. Mr Johnson, meanwhile, had no qualms about presenting the National Insurance rise as Rishi’s tax hike, and pretending that it was nothing to do with him, the first lord of the Treasury.
Mr Sunak half-U-turned on the policy this year, cutting the visible part of National Insurance for the lower paid, but keeping the stealthy rise in employers’ contributions – and getting no credit for any of it. But by then he already had other problems. Anna Isaac of The Independent reported in April that Mr Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, held non-domiciled status and benefited from its tax privileges. When I had previously asked political sources about suggestions that she might be a non-dom, I was told she could not possibly be, because it would be so damaging to Mr Sunak’s ambitions when it came out, as it would be bound to do if he stood to be leader and prime minister.
A few days later it emerged that Mr Sunak had held a US green card – requiring him to declare that he regarded the US as his permanent residence – until last year. And a few days after that, he was issued with a fixed penalty notice by the Metropolitan Police for arriving early for a ministerial meeting on the prime minister’s birthday during coronavirus restrictions.
Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s adviser, who had been instrumental in making Mr Sunak chancellor in the first place and who keenly wanted Mr Sunak to take over from his despised former boss, summed up his prospects at the end of May: “I don’t want to say ‘no chance’, but I think he’s out of it.”
Yet when Mr Johnson did suddenly fall, the other candidates seemed so weak that Mr Sunak was still preferred by default among MPs. If William Hague had not felt so threatened by Michael Portillo that he changed the leadership election rules in 1998, Mr Sunak would almost certainly be prime minister by now. Instead, his resignation as chancellor both forced Mr Johnson’s departure and ensured that Mr Sunak could not succeed him. In addition to being a tax-raising global elitist, he was now also a backstabber in the eyes of too many Tory members.
The die was probably already cast, but Mr Sunak’s campaign strategy was also fundamentally flawed. His pitch was that the other candidates were offering fairytales, whereas only he was prepared to tell the members what they did not want to hear. He was right. They did not want to hear it and they did not vote for it.
The party members don’t want him, and the backstabber myth is only going to tighten its grip on them, the only segment of the population among whom the idea of Boris betrayed has any purchase
His inexperience showed and instead of adjusting his pitch so that it became a bid for a big job in Ms Truss’s government, he continued to tell the truth as he saw it, which was that her policies, which party members wanted, were “immoral”.
In the early days of the campaign, he may have thought that, if he stuck to his guns about tax cuts having to be paid for, he would soon be able to say “I told you so” when Ms Truss ran into trouble in government and might then be well placed in the next leadership contest. This may be an equal and opposite delusion to Mr Johnson’s evident belief that the party would realise its terrible mistake in getting rid of him and beg him to return.
Mr Johnson is unlikely to be recalled from the wilderness by a desperate and contrite Tory party. The MPs got rid of him for good reasons and the wider electorate wanted him out. Fortunes can change but the odds are against it and Mr Sunak is even less likely to be given a second chance. Mt Cummings may not have been right in May but he is right now: Mr Sunak is “out of it”. The party members do not want him and the backstabber myth is only going to tighten its grip on them, the only segment of the population among whom the idea of Boris betrayed has any purchase.
What next for him, then? He doesn’t want a job in Ms Truss’s government and although he corrected himself after initially refusing to say that he would vote for her tax cuts in the Commons – if he failed to do so, he would be expelled from the party. So he said that “of course, I’d always support a Conservative government”. He was forced to say he would stay as an MP if he lost, but that is a weightless promise. Mr Cameron intended to stay until he found he could not say anything without it being taken as a criticism of his successor.
On the other hand, one friend of his says: “He’ll stick around. The one way not to have a future in politics is to leave it.” They point out that everything can change beyond recognition in a year or two.
Perhaps Mr Sunak thinks he can make a comeback, but if he were to leave parliament, I don’t believe he would go back to business. His friends say he is not interested in making more money. He would be more likely to want a big public service role, possibly on the world stage. Perhaps he needs a big international charity job, possibly based in the US, like that other bright star who would have been prime minister if his party’s MPs had made the choice: David Miliband.
